If you want to know more about the topic, you can always check out the post I've been also reading.
And because of this post I decided to write a couple of stuff about Victorian Age photography.
At the end of this school year we went to Rosia Montana- I'm pretty sure you remember it. On our way back to the city, somehow we ended up discussing the topic of post mortem photographs, and I was shocked to hear that no one around me knew what they were.
I tried to explain to them back then, and gave a couple of reasons for why this seemed as such a grande idea for the people back then, but I'm not exactly sure if I did a good enough job of it (we were all really tired after all).
So I guess, you all who are squeamish should just leave this post where it is now, because it's going to turn just a little bit weird.
Now, in the Victorian Era any kind of photography was pretty rare and expensive, although it was still something that middle class people could spend some money on. And it was also a quicker and less costly thing than sitting for a painted portrait (added to that the fact that it could be more accurate than some half-crazy artist painting some kind of freakish picture that was supposed to represent you).
Because in the Victorian Era mortality was extremely high, people didn't usually have the time for long sessions of sitting for portraits either- especially not kids and babies.
So this way, the most usual practice came to life from that time - you could always make a picture of your loved ones after they passed away.
People who specialized in making these kind of pictures even had all kinds of props made for the adults - because adults were usually photographed sitting on chairs, or braced on all kinds of weird props in unnatural looking poses.
Kids were usually photographed in their cribs, as if they were asleep. In those pictures lots of times the mothers stood aside them, making everything even more horrifying.
You could also tell pretty easily which pictures were made with dead people as main characters.
In those times sitting still for a photograph to develop was pretty boring. Pictures usually came out just a little bit blurry from all the little movements the people were making while they sat around. But not the dead - photographs that had them were usually eerily focused (and it seems a bit strange how having a really well-focused picture could be so weird in those days when nowadays you get angry if your pictures are blurry).
To make things more 'real', the dead in these pictures had their eyes popped open, or they just drew the eyes in on the pictures. Later on they even painted a light rosy pink tint on to the cheeks of the dead.
As the time went on, though, this started to get a lot more extinct, and people just took pictures of their dead in their coffin. I guess it saved a lot of time - and probably also money, if you didn't have to pay for the 'artists' to play around with your dead relatives.
And now, here are some pics for your enjoyment (if you made it till now, be sure to continue... I'm pretty sure you aren't scared or disgusted by dead people).
All right, so I left out the pictures that had coffins in them, cause they creeped me out even more than these for some reason (I don't know why). But every pic was taken from here, and this site has even more of them, if you want to check it out.
And a last one, I found pretty interesting:
In these times people practiced another kind of photography: spirit photography. As you see, with some pretty nice techniques they managed to add a spirit kind of picture above the dead person - and they did this without the use of Photoshop. Pretty neat, eh?
