Why Victorian Families Took Photos With The Dead

Photography also made memorial portraits available to everyone. Before the advent of the camera (during the 1830s/1840s), only the wealthiest families could afford painted portraits. This wealth gap is why painted portraits from this era are dominated by the aristocracy and royalty. Everyone else had to make do with a silhouette, small miniature painting or perhaps a lock of hair as a keepsake. Studios were quick to embrace this service.

During the early history of photography, many people died without ever having a professional portrait taken. In these cases, a post-mortem photo may well have been the only likeness that a family ever had of their loved one.

You may also have noticed that many of the post-mortem portraits are of infants and very young children. This is because mortality rates among children were much higher at this time than they are today. They might die before they had a studio portrait taken. This doesn’t mean, though, that parents were somehow desensitized to the death of their children.

Nowadays, death usually happens in a hospital or a care facility, and relatives leave most of the body preparation to professionals. But this was not always the case. In the nineteenth century, death occurred frequently in the home, where relatives might wash and dress the deceased, hold vigils beside the body, and participate in a widespread culture of mourning, of which parlor photographs were a part. In this context, post-mortem photography makes perfect sense.

To make them look like they were simply sleeping, and hence less scary for grieving families, the dead were often placed in a bed or cradle and surrounded by flowers.

Some families had the pictures made with deceased family members, parents with their dead children or a spouse next to their dead partner. These photographs, and many like them, are tragic in that they keep the image of the loved one while recording the family’s grief forever.

Photography seemed to record truth in an unusual way because it was taken as an impartial rendition of actual physical reality rather than an artist’s interpretation. Its apparent realism and fidelity gave a photographic portrait emotional significance.

In fact, families in mourning long prior to the invention of the camera used mementos of their loved one to retain their memory, including locks of hair, memorial jewelry, death notices and memorial cards. Therefore, photographs became simply another medium with which to participate in mourning customs, and the remembrance of the dead.

While mourning rituals, memorial keepsakes, and post-mortem portraiture date back to well before the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and the subsequent long mourning period that Queen Victoria held, the Queen’s influence extended far into the future of court culture and mourning fashion for decades to come.

Online galleries of photographs frequently label uncanny-looking nineteenth-century portraits as Victorian “post-mortem” photos, rightly or wrongly. This trend is responsible for a pretty distorted picture of the prevalence of post-mortem photography. The people posing in many of these viral “shots of the dead” were actually very much alive, just following standard conventions for living nineteenth-century portraits.

The metal stands seen behind the heads of some nineteenth-century sitters were NOT to prop up those that were, well, dead. Instead, because the first photographs took a long time to expose, the stands were there for support in order to keep the image from being blurry.

The so-called “corpse stand” was actually built to support living people. There is very little evidence that photographers ever regularly propped up corpses on complicated standing devices in order to pose them next to relatives. There are accounts of photographers occasionally positioning a corpse in a standing position, which is a far cry from using a “corpse stand.”

There are many historical references to attempts to photograph the deceased in an upright position, but this was done by propping them on chairs or against walls, not (as is often believed) using iron standing stands to make corpses appear to be standing naturally.

Contrary to what the internet will tell you, corpses aren’t necessarily sharper. During much of the Victorian era, exposure times were short enough to allow the living to hold still for a perfectly sharp portrait. In addition, blur can have many causes, not all of which are related to life or death. Therefore, sharpness alone cannot be used to determine if a sitter is deceased.

There’s something unsettling about those eyes. That eerie look in so many Victorian portraits could be due to a combination of photography chemistry, lighting, exposure time and retouching by hand. Add in fading and physical deterioration after a century and it’s no wonder living subjects are so often mistaken for corpses online.

A number of articles claim that post-mortem photographers commonly painted over dead people’s eyelids to make it look like they have “open eyes” in order to make the person look “awake.” While retouching photos is/was a common practice, the evidence for this particular form of it being common or widespread is much shakier than popular articles give credit for.

In order to combat the exposure times, and the propensity of the subject matter to wiggle, photographers would hide mothers under furniture or drapes and let them hold the child still. These photographs are often thought to represent morbid images of dead children, but in fact the child that was likely the most active in the studio is the one people today think is dead!

The picture of Lewis Carroll reclining with his head resting on his hand is frequently circulated on the Internet as an example of post-mortem photography, but Carroll was very much alive when it was taken!

Post-mortem photography is another practice about which historians are loath to make blanket statements. It was a nineteenth-century custom, but there is no clear evidence that it was universal or widespread in all regions, with the British evidence pointing to it possibly being far less prevalent than modern internet writers like to imply.

Since photographs were usually a family record, the albums often did not survive intact, and any notes that may have been written about them were lost as photographs were sold in the antique trade without any trace of provenance. The photographs do survive, but historians don’t know what proportion of nineteenth-century families took them, or how common the practice really was — only that it happened.

The term “nineteenth-century post-mortem photography” may be the safest one, since “Victorian” is often used quite loosely to describe these practices. Popular writing on the subject has also drawn heavily on American photographic customs, even though “Victorian” technically refers only to Britain, during the reign of Queen Victoria, and the American (and even European) mourning photography customs were different, often by region.

Over time, certain death photos were taken that more explicitly addressed the subject matter. While some images attempted to make the deceased look alive, others included funeral trappings such as flowers and coffins instead of hiding the reality of death.

Throughout the late nineteenth century photography became both cheaper and quicker. It was no longer necessary to wait for the one exceptional event in order to document a person’s life; instead it became increasingly possible for families to have a portrait of their relatives while they were still living and well. Upon losing a loved one, a family could still have photographs of them, be it smiling, working, or just going about their everyday life, similar to the photographs many people have nowadays on their smartphones.

It has been suggested that the practice fell out of fashion as child mortality rates began to decrease, since children comprised a major proportion of those photographed after death, alongside changing attitudes towards death and its depiction, and changing practices surrounding care of the dead.

Though Queen Victoria died in 1901, post-mortem photography didn’t stop on one particular day: examples continued well into the twentieth century, and certain types of death photography can still be seen in various modern cultures and contexts.

This content was created with the help of AI.