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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...
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...
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.
- Into The Macabre Victorian Practice of Photographing The Dead
- Death in The Victorian Era
- From Painted Portraits to Photographs
- Mimicking Life Through Art
- Popularity and Decline
- Is Death Photography Fake?
- Act of Tribute Or Morbid Practice?
The Victorian era was — let’s just say — a strange time to be alive. There were many things from that period that people, nowadays, would find esoteric — or at times, even full-on bizarre. Like how fascinated the Victorians were by ancient Egypt, to the point that they literally unwrapped mummies for their after-dinner entertainment. Or how, back t...
Although some of us may imagine the Victorian era as a time of prosperity, fancy clothes, and rapid industrialization, the reality for the majority of the people from that period was — in truth — far less ideal than this. More than three-fourths of Victorian society was made up of the working class. And aside from their poor living and working cond...
Unsettling as it is, the Victorians did not have much choice as to their ultimate fate. They had to learn to move forward regardless of the rampant deaths and cope with their grief in ways they know how. The rich did this by having their departed loved ones painted on canvas, in art known today as posthumous portraiture. However, this method was to...
When the wealthy Victorians immortalized their deceased family members through posthumous portraits, they personalized the mementos by depicting the dead in poses, gestures, and facial expressions they were best remembered by. But, with postmortem photography, this apparently was not something that could be easily done — if it could be at all. This...
The era of death photography flourished for almost a century after the invention of the daguerreotype in the late 1830s. This was boosted by the later introduction of thecarte de visite— a type of pocket-sized photograph, which allowed easy mailing due to its size, as well as the cost-effective printing of multiple copies from a single negative. Ho...
Today, there are people who argue that postmortem photography is not actually a real thing — or, at the very least, that most of the photos we have of it online are “fake.” They point out how a good amount of corpses in supposed postmortems, found in galleries across the web, look very much alive. But the reason for this is actually far too simple....
As grim as death photography may sound to some people nowadays, the original essence of the practice was actually centered on honoring the dead and preserving their memory. It was not seen as something ghastly or creepy back then — rather, as something solemn and reflective. But the way we approach the idea of deathtoday hinders some of us from see...
Aug 11, 2022 · Flowers surround the corpse in several photos. In others, mortality and time symbols, such as an hourglass, identify the portrait as post-mortem photography. Real Victorian death photos provided families the impression of control by recording the deceased on film.
- Jordan Anthony
- ( Content Editor, Art Writer, Photographer )
Postmortem photography evolved out of posthumous portraiture, a mode of painting in which wealthy Europeans (and eventually Americans) memorialized dead family members by depicting them...
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Dec 27, 2020 · These characteristics of spirit photography reveal Victorian people’s inclination to believe in the freewill of choice afterlife and the possibility of communicating with deceased loved ones. Death photos and ghost photos are both subject to people’s hope and imagination.
