Photographing Death
Capturing after the final moments of life
One of my weirder hobbies is researching various death practices. I’m one of those people who love horror and all things creepy and bizarre. I have a particular fascination with Victorian era death practices as I find many of them to be unusual compared to today’s ways of grieving. Perhaps my favorite of these is death photography. I am endlessly curious about this seemingly morbid practice but also recognize that we still do something similar today.
How many times on social media do you see photos of funerals and the deceased is right in the picture? There is a strange trend of posing with the casket/deceased and then uploading that for all to see. Even back in the early 2000’s, at my mother-in-law’s funeral, we took pictures of her. I still have a printed copy of those pictures nearly 20 years later and at my grandfather’s funeral last week, again, many took pictures of him ( though I haven't seen those posted online).
How and why did the Victorian's end up with this unusual practice?Photography came about with the invention of the daguerre in 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (1787–1851). The cost for having a photo done was extremely expensive at first, a far cry from being able to take pictures on a device that fits into your hand, so photographs were limited to big events in a family’s life. Death happens to be one of those big events. Childhood early death was common and many times the only picture of a child a family may have, is the death photo.
We must also remember that this was a time of rampant disease, and death was a way of life for Victorian England. People dying left and right and this societal view that really almost embraced death, gave us a collection of slightly disturbing photos from the past. Queen Victoria herself was responsible for many of the customs and practices after her husband, Prince Albert passed away in 1861 and she spent the next 40 years mourning his death.
Cameras didn’t work like they do now and extremely long shutter speeds meant that the dead tend to be in focus more than their living relatives posing with them. The effect is odd and disorienting in some pictures. I have a book that showcases some of the best death photography pictures from the era and I find myself wondering about the people as I pour over the pictures. Who were they, what did their life look like before their end? There are dozens of books like this, so definitely check them out if you want to see more, it is an enlightening view into the practice.
I’m curious as to what it must have been like to pose with your dead relative in what often appears to be a family photo. I barely like being around people who are alive, so to pose with the dead seems completely odd to me but they may make better company than many of the living, so there is that.
As a mother, I can understand wanting those final pictures with your child who has passed away. The loss of a child would make me want a last picture with them, just to cement the reality of their death, if nothing else. There are services that do that at hospitals for parents who lose their young child and I have seen how much that helps the grieving.
The pictures of the children in death photography books are hardest to look at, especially the infants, but they honestly look so peaceful and often as if they were just sleeping. The ones of dead children with their alive siblings I find pretty creepy however, and those images haunt me a bit. The reasoning behind posing the dead, especially children, as if they were alive, was to celebrate their life and I can see where posing all your children together would fit into that but find it disturbing still.
Adults often had a “last sleep” picture taken, one immediately after death while on a bed or couch and not posed in the same way children were. The idea behind this was to show death is as natural as sleep and nothing to be afraid of. When you live in a culture of death, this must be a comforting thought and seems to have carried into today, with the casket pictures at funerals that people take today.
While these post-mortem pictures are not nearly the strangest death practice I have come across, it is the one in which often people show the most disgust. Many people today find it endlessly creepy and disturbing while others, such as myself, are endlessly curious about it. I think it all comes down to how you view death.
Are you someone who is scared of death or do you find yourself drawn to it because it is the one thing in life we know will eventually happen to us. I am in the latter group and I continue to spend my time learning about death and the impact we can leave on this world after. That is one reason why I write, words live on forever, long after our bodies are gone written word will still exist and because of that, I truly understand the desire of capturing a loved one so that they too can live on, if only in pictures.
As a final note, if anyone dares to take pictures with my corpse, I’m going to have to haunt you, you know I will.
