To be fascinated by Victorian Post Mortem photography?

[2kidsintow]

It is so sad. So many images of adults and children who have passed away and then were recorded for their families to remember them.

www.flickr.com/photos/thanatosdotnet/sets/72157600887340360

It was far more commonplace in victorian times for bodies to be laid out and displayed in an open casket.

The victorians also had many rules on what clothing must be worn by mourners, and mourning jewellery was also very popular in victorian times too, (locks of hair woven to make decorative pieces).

The comments on that site are fine, they are photographs on a photography site where people are discussing the quality and work of the photographer as well as the skills of those who are retouching the images.

oikopolis I think the photos are beautiful and sad too.

So sad. And very, very creepy to be looking at them on my lunch break.
I feel all kind of spooked out now. And that I have been looking at something I shouldn't.

I'm fascinated by Victorian photography, including post-mortem. It's very difficult to get this in context if you start from the way we view and treat death nowadays, but for the Victorians, death was always amongst them and the recent invention of photography provided the opportunity to have pictures to accompany the other rituals of death that were commonplace.

Even nowadays, back in Ireland, it is not unusual for people to want post-mortem photography (something I have been commissioned to do) although without the elaborate studio settings that typify the Victorian genre.

I can see that it would be comforting to be able to look at a picture of your child. They probably wouldnt have had any others would they

Sad photographs, but I don't find them disrespectful at all. Those who are pictured are dead. Their ancestors probably won't ever stumble across them. Can't see a problem at all.

I think that people probably don't feel as emotional about the pictures because they were taken a long time ago. If they were photos of a child who died last week, people would react with horror. It's like if you went to see Lindow man at the British Museum who was preserved in peat since 1 AD and was dug up in 1984. People are interested but not upset by it because they feel distanced from it because it happened so long ago.
If I was in the situation that the family of these Victorian children were in. Child dying and no photographic record, I would have had a photo taken as I would be desperate to have some sort of link with them. I wouldn't want to let them go. :(

The mother daughter ones are heartbreaking. And the sibling ones.

Fascinating. I have always had a fascination with death and funerals, maybe because my grandfather worked for a funeral firm (even though I never knew him- he died when my dad was a child)

I don't think it is weird at all to want to have photos to remember people by. My friend recently had a still born and she has a whole album of photos. It's very sad but totally understandable.

Those pictures are fascinating! And the restoration work is damn good!