Post Mortem Photography

In the olden days before photography, people used to hire painters to create portraits of those who had recently died as a way to keep the memories of the deceased alive. The dead were generally laid out in their best clothes with a special headdress, and some sort of token in their hands. The painter worked as fast as possible, for he had to complete the portrait before the body started to stank. Many probably made a pencil sketch of the lying corpse, then went home and completed the painting in leisure.

With the advent of photography and the introduction of the daguerrotype in 1839, it became possible to capture any moment within minutes. Naturally, painters were replaced by photographers and the tradition of deathbed portrait evolved into post-mortem photography, with one appalling difference—somehow, Victorian people thought it was sensible to dress the deceased, fix their hair and prop them up to make them appear alive. Sometimes, make-up or paint was applied to the face of the deceased to conceal their sunken-eyes and sallow skin. Cheeks were reddened to appear flushed; sometimes even eyes were painted on closed eyelids. Often the living family members would surround the corpse and pose alongside. Dead children are poised as if asleep, surrounded by the toys they played with while alive.

While many of these photos may appear morbid to modern sensibilities, postmortem photographs are sorrowful images. They depict grieving parents, tenderly holding their lost child. They show wives caressing the faces of lost husbands. These images would then be cherished by the family or friends of the deceased, kept in hard cases and displayed on their mantel or kept in private. Some are framed and hung on the wall.

For many, a postmortem photo was the first and only portrait of someone. During the early years, people never bothered to get themselves photographed when alive, because photographs were costly, and studios were miles away from most households. But death was a different thing. Decades later, many veteran practitioners of the new medium recalled how parents would arrive at their doorsteps with stillborn infants, to whom they hadn’t even given a name. “Can you photograph this?” implored one young mother, opening a wooden basket to reveal “a tiny face like waxwork.”

Postmortem photography lasted some eight decades, until the 1920s, when photography became more common, cheap and instantaneous. Once it became common for people of different income levels to have pictures taken during their life, there was less need to capture their image in death.