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Jun 4, 2016 · Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness...
- Why Did People Take Post-Mortem Photos?
- The Creation of Post-Mortem Photos
- Beyond Victorian Death Photos: Masks, Mourning, and Memento Mori
- Fake Victorian Post-Mortem Photos
In the first half of the 19th century, photography was a new and exciting medium. So the masses wanted to capture life's biggest momentson film. Sadly, one of the most common moments captured was death. Due to the high mortality rates, most people couldn't expect to live past their 40s. And when disease spread, infants and children were especially ...
Photographing dead people may seem like a ghastly task. But in the 19th century, deceased subjects were often easier to capture on film than living ones — because they weren't able to move. Due to the slow shutter speed of early cameras, subjects had to remain still to create crisp images. When people visited studios, photographers would sometimes ...
People in the Victorian era mourned deeply after the death of a loved one — and this mourning certainly wasn't limited to photos. It was common for widows to wear black for years after their husbands died. Some even clipped hair from their dead loved ones and preserved the locks in jewelry. As if that wasn't dark enough, Victorians often surrounded...
Today, some Victorian death photos shared online are actually fakes— or they're photographs of the living mistaken for the dead. Take, for example, a commonly shared image of a man reclining in a chair. "The photographer posed a dead person with his arm supporting the head," many captions claim. But the photograph in question is a picture of the au...
Fake postmortem photos, whether categorized in error or intentionally mislabeled to sell for profit, have in recent years become widespread on the Internet. They fill online galleries of...
Dec 8, 2012 · What is Victorian Post Mortem Photography? In the Victorian era (1837-1901), in most of Europe and America, photographing the dead was common practice; an expensive service provided by photographers as a special way for families to preserve the memory of their loved ones.
Oct 20, 2014 · The eerie Victorian ritual of post-mortem photography ushered in a new era of family portraits – for the living and the dead. Grieving families soon took up the new technology to create everlasting mementos of the dearly departed.
Aug 11, 2022 · Today, numerous Victorian death images circulated online are either forgeries or photographs of the alive misidentified as the dead. Consider a widely circulated photograph of a man lying in a chair. Many subtitles suggest that “the cameraman posed a deceased person with his arm holding the head.”
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Oct 22, 2017 · Photography has been a way for people to remember people, places, and events. We commemorate and document life through photographs, and have been doing so since the 19th century. But photography has also been used to document death. In this episode we are discussing Victorian postmortem photography.