October 18, 2007
Memento Mori: Mourning, Monuments, and Memory (PDF) explores the relationship between memory, photography, and death. A Victorian memento mori photography gallery at Haunted When it Rains contains a good-sized collection of images that may seem a little sweet or somewhat disturbing, depending on how you take to these things. The same can be said for Photography and Loss in the 19th Century and Gone But Not Forgotten, two more galleries of post-mortem photographs. The Virtual Museum of Death Masks (Flash) is the web front-end of the One Street Museum in Kiev, Ukraine. It features death masks of a number of famous people, such as Pascal, Chopin, Beethoven, and Pushkin, as well as a history of death masks. And, if you want to build your own model of a death mask, the Cleveland Museum of Art offers instructions and a printout for a model of a Pharaoh's death mask.
-
Lots of purty stuff there. I've always dug postmortem photography. La mère qui ne dit rien Ou bien n'importe quoi Et du soir au matin Sous sa belle gueule d'apôtre Et dans son cadre en bois Y a la moustache du père Qui est mort d'une glissade
-
So poignant--the ones with the infants are heartbreaking. The poor mothers look shell-shocked. There's one is that's puzzling. The infant looks to animated to be dead, and the mother appears to be smiling.
-
They posed many with eyes open since the death picture might be the only one they'd ever have of a lost child. And the mother's smile looks strained. Maybe the photgrapher told her to say "cheeze"? Or, amybe, she was trying to express her feelings for her child before it died? Death photos seem to have been stilll taken in the midwest in the 1940s. I remember that my grandmother received a picture of a cousin in her casket from relatives in Illinois about then. I never knew her, but the image is burned into my brain.
-
Death photos - as well as things like weekly grave visitation - have some ethnic boundaries. Some Italian families, for example, kept both up until the 1960s or later. The historical society I used to work at used to have a few pages full of hair cuttings, where some young lady back then glued them to a page and decorated the page with ribbon, labelled each curl, and framed it. It was lovely until the freaking 'curator' repaired it with modern ribbon. (This is actually one of the reasons I quit.)
-
Roughly 15 years ago a second cousin of mine died, and his mother and sister asked me to take some photos in the visitation room. The funeral home employees didn't bat an eye (I really expected them to), so, apparently, it wasn't unheard of as late as the 1990s. I felt a little odd doing it, but, his mother really wanted them. (No, we're not Italian.)
-
This post needs more comments. because it is a fabulous post, and I forgot to tell Madam C.
-
Lovely. Thanks.
-
Postmortem photos -- the Victorian kind -- really creep me out. I can't watch the 2001 movie The Others (the one with Nicole Kidman), because the plot hinges on one of those photos. It's a shame, because it's a good movie. (I bought the DVD and wound up trading it in a few years later without ever even unwrapping it.) I saw my first of these photos in a magazine, probably Life, when I was 11 or 12, and it scarred me for etc. (That joke doesn't work as well if it turns out to have been Time, but anyway, it was in the spring of 1988.) However, If You're Into That Sort Of Thing, you might like to see Od Peacock - they make jewelry out of it. (Which I have never looked at. Because. Eeeee!) On another note, my great grandmother was photographed in her coffin in the early-to-mid 90s, and I believe my grandmother insisted on sending copies to my mother. Guess who refused to look at them? You know it!