Even today in the 21st century, you might see someone at a wake gingerly making their way up to the casket with their camera, hoping to snap one last picture of their loved one as they lay peacefully in their coffin.
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| Usually dressed in their best laying out clothes - their Sunday Best It became common practice to photograph the dead before burial using pins, tools, and clamps to prop up and hold the body in place until the portrait was taken. A Personal Story: I can remember being a young child of about 10 years old, paging through our family photo albums. I found an yellow dog-eared photograph of a newborn baby, laying in a small coffin and dressed in her christening outfit. I didn't recognize the name of the long-dead infant which was hand-printed on the back of the picture, along with the birth date and death date. At the time, I thought that it was morbid to take a picture of a dead baby to keep in photo albums. Years later when I was about 29 years old, I accompanied my fiance' to the viewing and funeral of his sister who had died with her newborn baby in a house fire. Both she and her infant lay in the same casket and he took a picture to show his grandmother who was in a nursing home. It was only then that I remembered the picture of the baby in our family photo albums when I was 10. As an adult, I knew that the parents took some comfort when they looked at the picture from time to time and that it reminded them that their baby girl really did exist long ago when years later there was nothing but the photograph to mark her place in family history.
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Because Victorians died young and of injuries and infections that modern medicine helped abolish, there were elaborate grieving rituals to give meaning to the lives of their loved ones.
Victorians would haul their dead out of a coffin, prop them up on stands, and take a picture that were worth a thousand words. These prop stands helped corpses look alive, and allowed the living to pose with their dead family members. Or so the story goes.
In recent years, whether categorized in error or intentionally mislabeled to sell for a profit, faked postmortem photos have become widespread on the Internet.
They fill online galleries of Victorian oddities and are on Pinterest and Instagram. Some quasi-reputable websites have contributed to the myths by vouching that the photos are real.
Postmortem posing stands are similar to microphone and guitar stands. Not only were they used to prop up the dead, professional photographers used them with their live models and family portraits to help them hold still when it took ten to thirty minutes to get the exposure just right before snapping the picture.
By 1839, when the daguerreotype was invented, the longest exposures were a minute and a half. By the 1850s, they were three to eight seconds and posing stands became less in use.
Not all postmortem pictures were of dead people. Some of those people were alive and were "posed" because postmortem pictures can bring a pretty penny on both eBay and Etsy.
People are easily duped because the majority of armchair collectors are not going to consult a patent library to see how authentic the pictures are before clicking the Buy-It-Now button. The more misinformation there is online, the more likely it is that someone’s “research” will turn up myths rather than facts. |
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