No props here: These are the chairs the dead once sat in, the toys their living bodies held. They bring the viewer close enough to the face of the dead to see a boy’s long lashes, or a girl’s spray of freckles.
Postmortem daguerreotypes are piercingly intimate. Such images mix comfort with a kind of cruelty. And yet for every photo like this one, a dozen more exist in which photography’s irrepressible realism exposes the charade, in the form of fever sores or sunken eyes. Consider the image above, of a boy who bears no trace of decay in his luscious round face. But this conceit has an ulterior motive: to trick the viewer into believing that death is sleep, no metaphor about it. “It has a heavenly calm in it,” the English author Mary Russell Mitford remarked of her father’s cast in 1842. The convention makes death look easy and gentle-a rest from labor. Many photographs from the 1840s and ’50s depict a corpse posed in a semblance of sleep. How else to interpret a daguerreotype of a mother lying next to her child? The faces of many mourners evidence the struggle. By pressing subjects to execute specific poses and gestures, death photos helped the living externalize personal loss. 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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