Dead people don't stand in photos.

Seriously, how could they?

This might be an unpopular post. One reason that myths persist long after they've been disproven is that people want to believe them. Pictures of Victorian dead people are so popular today that people try to forge them. Contemporary imposters are easily spotted and often meant to be art, rather than forgeries, but many fans of Victorian mourning portraits stubbornly refuse to believe they could be wrong about the health of the people in old Victorian photos.

Why does it matter if we enjoy mistaking a person in an old photo for a corpse? Imagine if people in 2116 published your Facebook profile picture as an example of fascinating post-mortem photography. When BBC News published Bethan Bell's article yesterday, full of pictures that she claimed were of people who died, one commenter noted that one of the pictures was of her great-grandmother. 

As it turns out, the commenter's great-grandmother was in fact dead in the photo Bell shared, but this was not the case in some of Bell's other photos.

Bell claims "the youngest child [in the above photo] has died and is propped against a stand for the picture." The type of stand Bell is referring to can be seen clearly in the picture below.

Photo source.

Sadly, Bell has been duped by the persistent myth that these stands were used to prop up corpses for mourning photos. As is evident in this photo, the child being photographed is alive and such a stand is not strong enough to keep a dead person upright. Take a closer look at the stand.

I'm not convinced I could hang my purse on a stand like that without knocking it over, so you may safely assume that, any time you see evidence of one of these stands in a photo, the person is alive.

Bell shares two other photos of people who were alive when the portrait was taken. She asserts that sometimes open eyes were painted onto the photograph. If you've ever tried painting something on a photograph, you will know that this rarely works out well. Because it generally looked terrible, Victorians rarely did so and the woman on the left is sick, but not dead when visited by the photographer (those are her real eyes).

Finally, not all Victorian mourning photos contained pictures of the corpse. It was also common to take a living photo of the deceased and have it reprinted with a phrase, like "Gone to Jesus," in honour of their passing.

The boy on the right was very much alive when the
photo was taken.

A group of contemporary Victorianists have even banned together to create a web site to dispel the kinds of myths about Victorian death photography that Bell and BBC News are currently spreading.

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Photos of Victorian Dead People

WARNING: This post contains images of dead Victorian babies. This is a terribly sad collection of photos.

Taking pictures of dead people was a classical Victorian art form that lasted well into the twentieth century and is more politely referred to as 'post-mortem photography,' or 'memorial portraiture.' The photos themselves were called 'cabinet cards,' or 'mourning portraits.'

While we may consider them creepy, they were a normal part of American and European culture, and are still used today by many families who lose a baby during childbirth. Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep is the name of one organization that provides this service to grieving families.

In the 1890s, grieving families commissioned the photos of lost loved ones of all ages. The pictures were, in many cases, the only visual remembrance they had of their lost loved one.

Before 1839, mourning portraits were expensive endeavors that involved hiring a portrait artist. But the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, making a new kind of portraiture more accessible to the rising middle class. The practice reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century, and faded away during the twentieth.

Post-mortem photography faded away as medical services increasingly became a part of everyday life. In the nineteenth century, most people died in their homes, frequently during childhood. Children would often be photographed with a toy, or with another relative, usually a sibling, or the mother. High childhood mortality rates were part of why so many of these photos are of infants and children.

The most significant differences between post-mortem photography in the 1890s, and what organizations, like Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep, do today are where the photos are taken, and the stigma that is attached to them. I originally wrote this post as part of my halloween series, but am editing it now to encourage greater sensitivity toward this art form and its history, which is as long as the history of photography.

Infant 1890

Montreal 1890

Metta Jones, age 2 months, April 1890.

Germany 1890

Boy photographed by G.W. Barnes,
Rockford IL, 1890.

Mom and triplets, 1890.

Rosita Quintero 1892

A young girl in West Newton Massachusetts, 1893.

The Keller Family, 1894.

A priest, 1897.

5 year-old Flora Hoffman, 1897.

Miss Grace, 1898.

One of the most common misconceptions of post-mortem photography is that metal stands were used to pose the dead as if they were still alive. Dead subjects were usually posed in coffins, in beds, or as if napping in a chair. Brady stands, which people commonly think were used to pose the dead, were actually used to assist the living in staying still long enough to have their photos taken. If you spot one of these stands in a Victorian photo, it's a good indication that the subject was alive at the time the photo was taken.

Which raises the question: What the heck is happening in this photo???

This post was edited on 24 November 2014.

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