More than a century ago, photographs of you and your loved ones were a bit of a challenge to get… expensive, difficult, time consuming, and possibly just not really available. So, it would make sense for people to put off getting family photo-portraits. But people – especially children – also had a tendency to drop dead from any of a wide range of diseases. So it would be entirely possible for someone to keel over without a single photo having been taken of them. You might think that that would be that, but no: post-mortem photography was apparently A Thing. Your kid keels over, you have no photos of ’em… so you now have at most a few days to get photos before Junior starts ripening. Some of the photos tried to make the subject look alive; many, perhaps most, were satisfied with Look, He’s Dead.

So if’n you have a hankering to see a bunch of dead folk, including a bunch of dead kids, a photographer has gathered a number together for your viewing pleasure:

Strange Past: Post Mortem Photography

To most of us today the idea is beyond creepy. But a century or more ago, people had a closer relationship with death. Until the 1920’s, a good well-appointed house would have a Parlor, a room full of all the best bling, intended for impressing visitors. One important purpose of the Parlor was as a display place for dead folk: when Granny or Junior died of consumption or the vapors or whatever, they’d spend a day or three in the Parlor with friends and family visiting, then a hole would be dug out back in the family cemetery and the dead would be buried. But starting in the early 20th century, dead folk began to find themselves unwelcome in the home: instead of being propped up in the Parlor, granny would find herself in a dedicated funeral home. Additionally: read the uncensored Grimm’s Fairy Tales and similar works. Children were exposed to Death both in reality and in literature. And as dead folk were starting to be hidden away from children in the early 20th century, death started to get written out of childrens stories. Compare the original tales with what Disney made of ’em.

So, it’s not really surprising that there was an industry devoted to taking photos of live kids alongside dead kids. Sure, parents would probably rather have had photos of their kids live and healthy, but post-mortem photos allowed them to at least have *something.*

While post-mortem portraiture would seem to be obsolete, heigh thee hence to yon Youtube. A whole lot of pet owners seem to like getting  videos of their beloved cat or dog getting that last shot at the vet. Not a chance in hell I’d want that, but others differ.