Why Some Families Photographed Their Dead: Post-Mortem Photography

Among the strangest-seeming artifacts of the 19th century are photographs of the dead: an infant in christening robes, a young woman on her bed surrounded by flowers, parents posed beside a daughter who has died. They were made with love, and they were ordinary.

Why would a family want a photograph of someone who had died?

Because they often had no other. Photography arrived in 1839 and for decades a portrait was an occasion, not a habit. Death, meanwhile, was everywhere: epidemics swept cities and infant mortality was high. A collector quoted by Hyperallergic, the physician Stanley Burns, explained that for families without the money for regular studio visits, a death was often the only chance to take an image of a family member at all. For a child who died in infancy, the post-mortem portrait might be the only picture the parents would ever hold.

The photographers had a slogan for it, according to a history site: secure the shadow, ere the substance fades.

What did the pictures look like?

Mostly like sleep. Burns divides them into two types: those that show the person in death, and those that pose the person as if alive, according to Family Tree Magazine. In the great majority, the subject lies on a bed, a couch, or in a coffin, often with flowers. Children were photographed most often, sometimes in a parent’s arms or a baby carriage. Some photographers tinted the cheeks or painted open eyes onto closed lids. Burns notes in his book Sleeping Beauty II, as quoted by Mental Floss, that because the dead of the 19th century often died of infectious diseases rather than cancer or extreme old age, they frequently appeared quite healthy in the pictures.

Were corpses really propped up on stands?

No. This is the most widespread myth about these photographs, and it spread online around 2014, according to a genealogy site that traced its history. Victorian studios used iron posing stands to hold living sitters still, because exposures of a second or more allowed blurring. Jack Mord, who runs the Thanatos Archive of post-mortem photographs, told Mental Floss that people see the base of a stand in a picture and assume it propped up a dead body, but that was never the case. Mike Zohn, another collector, told Atlas Obscura the same. The stands could not have supported a corpse, and the dead were photographed lying down.

The practical result for anyone browsing old photographs: a visible stand means the person was alive. Many images circulating online as “post-mortem” are living portraits.

How common was the practice?

Common enough to be unremarkable. Burns told an audience that post-mortem photographs were an unquestioned aspect of everyday life in the 19th century, and his collection, the Burns Archive, holds hundreds of them; the Thanatos Archive catalogs about 2,000. Jay Ruby’s 1995 study, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, is the standard scholarly history. The pictures were kept in albums, set in lockets and cases, and, once prints could be reproduced, sent to relatives who could not attend the funeral.

When did it stop?

It faded by the 1930s in the United States, according to Mental Floss, as death moved from the home to the hospital, public mourning shortened, infant mortality fell, and cameras became cheap enough that most people already had pictures of their relatives alive. The last photograph of a loved one stopped being a photograph of them dead. See the last photograph.

Does it still happen?

Yes, in one setting especially. Hospitals today offer parents of stillborn babies and infants who die soon after birth a chance to have photographs taken, sometimes by volunteer professional photographers, and Burns has lectured on the continuity from the 1840s to present-day obstetric and pediatric practice, according to a Yale medical library event notice. Families also take their own photographs at a bedside or viewing, more often than they say. See what happens after a stillbirth.

How should I look at these photographs?

As the people who made them did. The American Heritage reviewer who called Burns’s book disturbing also conceded its point: these were acts of care. A family with one chance to keep a face chose to keep it. Historians see in the pictures what we’re still trying to do with memory and loss. See how to preserve photos and video tributes.

This is a history article. Customs varied by place, class, and family, and the sources are historians, museums, and period publications rather than contemporary records in every case.