As a ritual, postmortem photography helped check grief. Rituals help the living overcome the desire to die with the dead. Many subjects make trembling attempts at self-composure. There are parents so young they look like children themselves. A surprising number of fathers appear-at this time, men could openly admit their grief. The corpse figures prominently, but so do the shattered expressions of those left behind. Many postmortem pictures show parents cradling their children, or wives alongside their deceased husbands. They kept other things, too, like a baby’s silken curl or a piece of a girl’s ribbon. Like tiny reliquaries, daguerreotypes kept safe the image of one’s beloved. They came in small cases of leather or ebony, opened by a delicate handle. Daguerreotypes were produced as three-dimensional objects, meant for the hand as much as the eye. When held at the right angle, a grieving widow would have seen her image meld with that of her husband, a striking reunion after death. The dominant mode of photography for its first 15 years, the daguerreotype was rendered on a copper sheet burnished to look like a mirror. “Can you photograph this?” implored one young mother, opening a wooden basket to reveal “a tiny face like waxwork.”Īlmost all the postmortem photographs from this period are daguerreotypes. Decades later, in trade journals like The Philadelphia Photographer, veteran practitioners wrote of how parents would arrive at their doorsteps with stillborn infants, to whom they hadn’t even given a name. People who had never given a thought to the medium now turned to it in desperation. At $2 each (roughly $60 today), photographs were costly, and in America’s open expanses, studios were miles away from most households. It animated a body, astonishing viewers each time they gazed upon it.ĭuring the 1840s and early 1850s, a postmortem photo would likely have been the first and only portrait of someone.
But this new invention also had something of resurrection about it. the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!” For many, procuring a postmortem photo must have felt like a funerary ritual-a way of allowing the dead to become fully dead. “It is not merely the likeness which is precious,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning of a postmortem portrait, “but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing.
But compared to these earlier media, photographs possessed an almost magical verisimilitude.
Photography extended the centuries-old traditions of death masks and mortuary paintings, which commemorate the dead by fixing them in an illusion of life.
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