Post-mortem photography

Almost from beginning of the discovery of photography, people took photographs of their dead. This continued what was done in other art forms before the invention of photography. (Ruby, 1999, p. 38) [1] With the increased popularity of photography, especially in the Victorian era, post-mortem photography expanded (Borgo, Licata and Iorio, 2016, p. 104). This practice has continued to this day although is not something which is widespread and is not something that is much spoken of. Current examples include the work of Caroline Catlin who photographs dead or dying babies as a service to the parents. (Catlin, 2019) or the work of Annie Leibovitz who documented the treatment for cancer leading to the death of her partner Susan Sontag in 2004. This included pictures of her corpse. (Leibovitz, 2006) [2] With the recent Covid pandemic with its periods of lockdowns, many have come across funeral services which use livestreaming or are recorded and replayed. There is also a recent phenomenon where people take selfies at funerals and post these on social media platforms. (Meese et al., 2015, p. 2) These might be seen as a rise of post-mortem photography once more.

Is there a difference between how post-mortem photography was thought of in the Victorian era to how it is thought of today? By reading books contemporaneous with the time of early photography and some which describe post-mortem photography, I can begin to build an impression of this period. In the Victorian era, the photographic image seemed to be about creating a perfect memory. [3] Although this idea of a perfect memory is not specific to post-mortem photography, they provide an insight into the aims of commercial photography as was thought at the time. I can imagine that many of these ideas around what made a ‘good photograph’ continued in post-mortem photography. In a novel by Amy Levy, she describes an assignment given to one of her characters to photograph a dead body. Firstly, there was practical concerns over what the dead had died of the potential medical risk to the living as well as thoughts of decomposition. After that there were the technical details; where to photograph the body, how to pose it, whether to pose alone or with the living, should the eyes be open or closed, whether to include props and so on. In the book, the photographer visits the house where the dead person lies. I imagine that this would have been simpler than moving corpses to the photographic studio. The dead were often not shown as being dead but instead as sleeping on a bed as Levy writes with hair artfully arranged on the pillow. (Levy, 1889, pp. 70–76) Jennifer Green-Lewis writes that the photograph was to show that this dead person once lived and adds that a child might be posed in the arms of the mother and also that, “the post-mortem photograph was not a truth-teller so much as an aide-mémoire: a means of recalling a subject and resisting a loss.” (Green-Lewis, 2017, p. 100) [4]

This post-mortem photograph could be used by the surviving family to create a shrine almost in the style of a religious reliquary. Early photography was too big to be worn as it had been from when miniature paintings or with hair from the dead which could be worn in lockets or as items of jewellery. Batchen speaks of the photograph being able to convey the idea of absence and of using figures photographed with symbolism such as drapes around pictures or perhaps with closed photograph cases to convey the idea of loss. As technology improved, photographic images able to be produced which would fit into a brooch or locket and this could be combined with locks of hair from the deceased. (Batchen, 2004, pp. 12, 33, 47, 66). Batchen raises as interesting question. “What kind of memory does it seek to stimulate?” I think in answer that the hair or the photograph provides a link between the living and the person who is missing. Those in grief can carry that locket or image or can create a shrine or in the modern age, have a photograph on their mobile phone or tattooed onto their skins and these objects and the actions involved in gathering or making the shrines or memorials are acts of memory. Perhaps these small acts help to cement an idea of memory for that person?

Post-mortem photography also took place when recording the battlefield in early photojournalism. In some of these early attempts such as in the US Civil War, the photographer might reposition bodies or artefacts on the battlefield so as to enhance or create a scene. Other examples of post-mortem photography were in medicine recording disease and treatments, in crime where images of the executed might be recorded. There is also fakery and illusion whether for money or effect. An example of this would be spirit photography.

One interesting point of view is that photographing the dead has dulled the shock of seeing atrocities and that death photography has, “removed emotion from its audience.” (Harris et al., 2020, sec. e-Book location 160/2458) Where I can see that there is increased visibility of violence or of death, that this might dull our response, I am less certain that I would say this goes as far as removing emotion completely.

In writing about post-mortem photograph and the difference to how this was thought of in the Victorian era as opposed to the modern day, does this reflect attitudes towards death? Was the task of shifting dead bodies around a battlefield less macabre as war and death were more commonplace and thought of differently that they are today? I look at these things through my own eyes, seeing the world from the vantage point of a time of computers, the internet, penicillin, heart transplants, jet engines and more. Is it impossible to pretend these things don’t exist and imagine myself in a very different past? Is grief universal and it doesn’t matter if a child died in a large Victorian family or in a small 2 x 2 family of today? Does death as a more common experience lessens grief?

I have framed my previous paragraph as a long series of questions to which I offer no direct answers. Maybe this reflects my idea of what the liminal threshold to death means. The answers, if known, are held by the dead. I can only look at the past and imagine what it must have been like but at the same time unable to look through Victorian eyes and to completely forget today.

References

Batchen, G. (2004) Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=2YAXe5_y3IIC&pgis=1.

Borgo, M., Licata, M. and Iorio, S. (2016) ‘Post-mortem Photography: the Edge Where Life Meets Death?’, Human and Social Studies, 5(2), pp. 103–115. doi: 10.1515/hssr-2016-0016.

Catlin, C. (2019) Opinion | What I Learned Photographing Death – The New York Times, NY Times. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/opinion/sunday/cancer-deathbed-photography.html (Accessed: 18 May 2023).

Edwards, E. (2005) The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Edited by R. Lenman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Green-Lewis, J. (2017) Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory: Already the Past. London: Bloombury Visual Arts.

Harris, R. et al. (2020) Photography and Death: Framing Death throughout History. Edited by E. Publishing. Bingley.

Leibovitz, A. (2006) A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005. New York: Random House.

Levy, A. (1889) The Romance of a Shop. Boston: Cupples and Hurd, The Algonqui press. Available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/57447.

Meese, J. et al. (2015) ‘Selfies at funerals: Mourning and presencing on social media platforms’, International Journal of Communication, 9(1), pp. 1818–1831.

Robinson, H. P. (1896) The Elements of a Pictorial Photograph. Bradford: Percy Lund & Co, The County Press. Available at: %0A%0A.

Ruby, J. (1999) Secure the Shadow – Death & Photography in America: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

[1]Visual and historical anthropologist, Elizabeth Edwards wrote of post-mortem photographs, “they all fulfil the same social function. In many cases they derive their iconography from earlier forms of memorial engraving and funeral art, or reflect the 19^th-century taste for sentimental pictures” (Edwards, 2005, p. 521)

[2] Post-mortem photography is of the dead. Memorial photography is usually, but not always, pictures taken of the dead while they were living. (Edwards, 2005, p. 518)

[3] Contemporary English photographer, Henry Peach Robinson writes of the aims of photography in his opinion and in his point in time. I think he is talking about what sells, “The pleasures of memory are enormously increased if to your mental picture-gallery you can add a gallery of truthful aids to memory. We don’t want the counterfeit presentment of the hotel where we spent an uncomfortable night; the pier on which we landed; the lodgings we hired in a row; or even the little Bethel we visited; we want well- executed views of the beauties of nature. I particularly want a picture of cloud-capped Arran in sunlight after a thunderstorm, and of that sunrise at Gourock, which seemed to set the world in a blaze.”(Robinson, 1896, p. 138)

“Photography can only represent what is before it. If we are to accept this stereotyped saying, which we will for the moment, it helps to clear away and place outside our boundaries many things that are not worth sighing for, and better out of the way. It clears off all the past, the dead, and gone, and vanished.” (Robinson, 1896, p. 76)

[4] Greene-Lewis quotes a portrait photographer of the time, William Friese-Green. Much of the images, advertising and poetry of Friese-Greene has survived. One of his poems reads,
“Photography is like magician’s charm-
We nurse the absent, in affection warm;
Present the distant, and retain the dead –
Shadows remaining, but the substance fled;
For faces vanish like the dreams of the night,
But live in portraits drawn by beams of light.
Exquisite nature caught in changing dress;
Motion in photography appears at rest.”

A similar poem is quoted by Batchen although the source for this is uncertain,

“secure the shadow ere the substance fade,”

These words appear in the advertisement taken out by Noah North in September 1845 in the Livingston County Whig of Geneseo, New York. This advertisement is quoted in Daniel Fink, “Funerary, Posthumous, Postmortem Daguerreotypes,” in The Daguerreian Annual, ed. Peter Palmquist (1990), 56. The phrase also appears in an 1843 advertisement published by “Alvah Ames, Daguerrian Artist,” held in the collection of Matthew Isenburg in Connecticut, and in an advertisement for a photographer named Faxon published in the Springfield Gazette in September 1841. (Batchen, 2004, pp. 101–102)