Memento Mori - 18 Creepy Post-Mortem Photos From The Victorian Era

[malaise]

http://www.oddee.com/item_98883.aspx

When photography was a new art form, it was expensive and the process was laborious. Post-mortem photos or memento mori (Latin for "remember that you will die&quot were often the only time a person was photographed. Check out these 18 examples of memorial photos from the Victorian age.

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Some are sad like the parents who could let their daughter go and kept her for nine days.
Must have been winter or they had a lot of ice

[sharp_stick]

1. I often forget how

lucky we are to live in a time when dead children are not common.

[malaise]

4. Yep

that was so common back then

[rug]

2. Wow, Edgar Allan Poe is in there.

[malaise]

3. Couldn't believe it either

Some of them look very dead - they're all wrinkle free - one of death's few benefits

[virgogal]

5. "Memento Mori" definition was just a question on Jeopardy. (I did not know it)

[malaise]

6. That's why I posted this - heard it on Jeopardy

A few years ago there was a thread here with dead folks in Puerto Rico posing in their homes - and there was a lady from Louisiana as well. Some DU experts pointed out this practice in Victorian England - that's when I learned about the term. It's a profound truth

Notice William T. Anderson who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War still has his gun.

[Ex Lurker]

9. That's because it was a "trophy picture" taken just after being killed by Union troops

William T Anderson is better known as "Bloody Bill" Anderson, who fought in Missouri and Kansas as one of Quantrill's guerillas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_T._Anderson

[malaise]

11. Thanks for that

[BillZBubb]

26. I didn't make the connection to "Bloody Bill".

He was a real nasty character.

[smirkymonkey]

7. Creepy, yet interesting.

Thanks for posting!

[nadinbrzezinski]

8. Interesting

But well done photography is still an art form. Granted digital allows me to take 45 photos at an accident scene. One was truly a file picture of the trolley from an angle you cannot get, generally speaking.

And for the record...we do not post process stuff.

[malaise]

16. Agree re the art form but what is process stuff?

I once took an amazing photo quite by accident - got the ball shattering the cricket stump

[nadinbrzezinski]

21. Photo shop

We had a scary conversation with my niece and former boss. Wedding photography. Every photo goes through photoshop. Then again, we do a fair amount of breaking news night photography. So I guess I know how to do that and get a good photo. But when we were taking photos at her wedding, not the wedding night, in a pretty dark environment, her boss could not do it without a flash and we were, she asked. We said push up your ISO

I am not kidding, IS what?

That is what I mean. The post processing for most of the age of photography was done in the lab. How long you left a photo in the chemicals for example. Those of us who learned to do that know this better I suppose. Kids these days learn photoshop. One of our local news papers, the UT, just like us....has a copy somewhere, but the most any of us do is well...crop. And my copy is not quite photoshop. You can fix under exposed and over exposed photos. Which you really could not do as well in the lab. You needed to get a good photo to begin with.

Though I admit, the wedding photography does pay bills. News not so much. A lot of the most artistic photography these days relies heavily on image manipulation.

[malaise]

27. OK I get it

Thanks

[synergie]

22. What do you imagine to be processed here?

[nadinbrzezinski]

23. Labs was the processing of the age

It was that way until the first digital cameras came out. Today people fix photos using photoshop. So the craft of composition suffers, can be fixed (that was the extent back then really as well, with cropping). And we can also fix exposure, coloration and saturation with photoshop. That is what is meant by post processing.

We prefer to take a good picture from the git go, and like most respectable media using ethics going back to tje age of film, we only crop when we do anything at all.

For the record, there is slight post processing in those photos, and it was a fashion at the time. See any of the pink coloration on cheeks? That was applied after the foto was fixed in the lab, by that I mean chemically fixed after development, by the photographer. It was a very strong fashion done for about thirty years and can be used to date photos within a period by historians when you lack the year of a photo.

[synergie]

31. So, what were saying was processed here, and which photos were you warning the OP

should not be posted here?

In that age when these photos were taken, the photographer was the "lab".

I'm still confused as to your point, you're saying that these memento mori have something to do with photoshop and you don't like their framing? Who cropped something?

I think you missed the point of the post. Um, I think you might be a bit confused here about your timelines and your understanding of memento mori photos taken in the 19th century, you're getting them confused, and the years are known here.

Perhaps stay on topic and pay attention to the actual thing being discussed and leave the amateur photo dating historian stuff to people that actually study it and understand what they actually did in the late 1800's with these photos. Some did add color, some might have been processed, but not the way you imagine, and not the time period you assert.

For the record, they added color to the dead babies faces sometimes for the parents who did not have any other remembrance of their dead children. They did that in the 1800's.

[nadinbrzezinski]

32. Miss it of course not surprised

Simple English. Will try Spanish too. The art of photography has not changed. El arte de la fotografía no a cambiado.

I expect this to be misunderstood. But if you have no clue what I am talking about when I say post processing we are wasting our time Amirite

[cali]

10. Wisconsin Death Trip

Michael Lesy's amazing 1970s era book, originally his doctoral thesis.


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisconsin_Death_Trip

[malaise]

12. Very interesting

Thanks

[cali]

14. I think you'd find this book fascinating, mal

I

[malaise]

19. This tells me a lot about Lesy

I wanted to convey in the film the real pathos contained in a four line newspaper report that simultaneously records and dismisses the end of someone’s life.[1]

[treestar]

13. It's interesting how many people

have no image at all, but now, every minute can be photographed.

[malaise]

15. Technology rules

Now everyone is a photographer

[treestar]

17. Yep. A newborn a few hours old has likely already been photographed several times more

than a Victorian whose only photo is after death.

Even more recently, you have to bring your camera to get photos, now people have a camera on them 24/7, in fact, a video camera!

[malaise]

28. Not just photographed

They have sent those photos across the planet for the world to see

[KittyWampus]

18. The dead made good subjects back then. They didn't move during the long exposure time required.

I am a history geek. Victorian England being a favorite era of mine.

While it seems odd now, what also seems odd is the way modern Americans sanitize death in real life as loved ones all too often die in a hospital alone. Even while watching fictional deaths daily on tv. And causing fictional deaths daily in gaming.

[malaise]

20. A profound post but it's not just Americans

Most folks don't even want to use the word died. She or he passed on, transitioned, went wherever but never the simple truth - she/he died.

[UTUSN]

24. In related matter, Buddy RICH's last words: "Is there anything you can't take?" --"Country music"

http://www.viralpiranha.com/right-before-they-died-they-had-one-last-thing-to-say/?utm_campaign=dcq-dt-us-160506-vp&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=242041-Their+Shocking+Final+Words+Before+They+Died-DonKnottsGun.jpg&utm_source=ob&utm_content=1b26f0-59375965

[malaise]

25. Haven't seen many of these

Thanks

[MFM008]

29. If you dont know about this

http://thanatos.net/

I was a member. Pictures of all types of Momento Mori including mourning dress and jewelry and medical stuff.

[JI7]

30. I'm always fascinated by life in old days

While this may seem creepy now it's totally understandable when you think of life back then.

Many also just look like that were sleeping.

I think the one with the girl nine days after is not really 9 days after death.

[synergie]

33. This actually still goes on in some countries, at least before the ubiquity of smartphones.

People take final pictures of their loved ones, and pose with families before the cremation etc. (Most of the world does not do the pumping of the body with chemicals, they bury or cremate within a day or two of the death.)

The girl 9 days after death could have been, note the fuzziness of the picture, they might have applied make up or other tricks to disguise the decay.