Here’s a question i posed recently to Cecil. i don’t hold out a lot of hope to be answered by the great master himself, but maybe the millions can lend the assist?
Dear Cecil,
Hi. I’ve seen a number of online galleries with “memento mori” images - photographs from the Victorian era that people took of their recently-departed loved ones. The deceased is usually ramrod stiff in a coffin, or posed oddly in a chair, often next to some family members with inscrutable looks in their eyes.
Many sites claim that certain stiffs have been posed in a standing position, sometimes with pupils painted over their closed eyelids. They point out the foot of a wooden stand behind the supposed corpse as proof that the person has been posed. In nearly all of these galleries, the Comments section fills up with people claiming - quite vehemently - that those stands were used to support living people through the arduously long exposure times of early cameras, and they warn against eBay scams claiming that Victorian photographs depict dead people.
I haven’t been able to determine whether the stands were intended for the living or the dead. The “team living” people claim that the stands were just to insubstantial to support the weight of a dead body, while some “team dead” commenters argue that not all early cameras had long exposures, particularly where flashbulbs were concerned, so the presence of a stand likely indicates someone pining for the fjords.
So which is it? We know that the Victorians routinely photographed their dead loved ones, but did they photograph the standing dead? And which photographs are verified? There’s a lot of debate over one particular picture of an awkward-looking firefighter. Is he a stiff Victorian, or a Victorian stiff?
Thanks for your help.
i get that posters arguing against the standing dead rumour are just trying to save people from predatory eBay sellers, but they’re frustratingly not backing up their claims with any reliable sources on the subject. Did Victorians NEVER pose the dead standing up? Like never EVER? i’m dying (…) to know.
The general gist being: yes, postmortem photos did happen; yes, metal standing frames were used, but only for living people, in order to keep them perfectly still during long shutter exposures that could last up to a minute.
My grandmother used to tell us about some of the shenanigans that took place during drunken wakes shortly after 1900. It seemed common to prop up the corpse, put a cigar or cigarette in his mouth and a drink in his hand; she said one of her favorite tricks as a kid was to tie a thread to the moustache and make the lip twitch.
Except for a couple of them where a motion blur is pointed at, and a couple others where the position doesn’t seem compatible with a dead body, this site doesn’t debunk. It just states that these are pictures of living people without giving any evidence either way.
Also, it doesn’t explain why these living people would need supports when, as already stated pose times weren’t that long (mind you these “supports” might be random things that just happened to be in the background without any relationship with the picture).
I don’t think it has been demonstrated it’s a myth.
Thanks, clairobscur, for agreeing with me that a site saying something is debunked, which provides no sources, is hardly a reliable resource!
So what’s the deal? These are the specific, researchable questions i’d love to know the answer to that could add up to a solution:
Were those photography stands actually too weak to support a human body?
Would a dead body really be too floppy to stand up? What about rigor mortis?
Was Victorian photography cheap and commonplace (making portrait photos far more common than post mortem photos, as the “debunking” site claims?)
Did Victorian cameras always use an agonizingly long 15-minute exposure? What about flash bulbs? When were they invented? Didn’t a camera using a flash bulb expose its film instantly?
Who’s the fireman? Is he dead, or not? Wouldn’t the source of the photo have a more reliable opinion on that?
My foray into the practice indicated that the postmortem photography was much more expensive than portraits of the living.
Photography progressed incredibly quickly on the period 1845-1880. The technology used would be limited by the date.
The first ‘flash’ was a tray of flash powder - old movies would have a person hold up a tray of powder and ignite it while under the darkcloth of a large-format (the only kind, at the time) camera.
I doubt that any flash was used prior to 1890.
The stands were used by photographers who were using very slow emulsions - and that varied by both time and place.
Big cities were using dry emulsion while the hicks were still using wet emulsion.
If you can determine the date of the photo, you can put a limit on how long the exposure was.
Did nobody ever pay a photographer enough to prop up mama?
Remember that the Parlor was where you laid out your dead - people were quite comfortable with handling the dead, and the dead never left the farm - they moved from the bedroom to the parlor to the patch out back (or into the root cellar until the ground thawed enough to bury the body).