"I see dead people": Victorian post-mortem photography

There's a slightly macabre story about the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a man so dissipated he expired from chronic alcoholism in his late 30s. (His last words purportedly were, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that's the record.") Lionized in America, he found the seductions of the White Horse pub a little too much for him and keeled over with a brain hemorrhage. His widow Caitlin recalls that when his body was being shipped back to Wales for burial, some of the deckhands noticed his coffin and sat down around it to play a spirited game of poker.

"How Dylan would have loved that!" she exclaimed.

Indeed.

The coffin in the picture above doesn't contain Dylan Thomas.  More likely the photo depicts one of those Irish wakes where they like to prop up the body with a drink in its hand and carouse all night long.  It does not really qualify as post-mortem photography except in the broadest sense: the subject is someone who is being memorialized in a permanent and significant way.

 

Before we look at any more of these, let's quote the Great and Powerful Wikipedia:

Post-mortem photography (also known as memorial portraiture or memento mori) is the practice of photographing the recently deceased.

The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made portraiture much more commonplace, as many of those who were unable to afford the commission of a painted portrait could afford to sit for a photography session. This cheaper and quicker method also provided the middle class with a means for memorializing dead loved ones.

These photographs served less as a reminder of mortality than as a keepsake to remember the deceased. This was especially common with infants and young children; Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post-mortem photograph might have been the only image of the child the family ever had. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be mailed to relatives.

The practice eventually peaked in popularity around the end of the 19th century and died out as "snapshot" photography became more commonplace, although a few examples of formal memorial portraits were still being produced well into the 20th century.

The earliest post-mortem photographs are usually close-ups of the face or shots of the full body and rarely include the coffin. The subject is usually depicted so as to seem in a deep sleep, or else arranged to appear more lifelike. Children were often shown in repose on a couch or in a crib, sometimes posed with a favorite toy or other plaything. It was not uncommon to photograph very young children with a family member, most frequently the mother. Adults were more commonly posed in chairs or even braced on specially-designed frames. Flowers were also a common prop in post-mortem photography of all types.

The effect of life was sometimes enhanced by either propping the subject's eyes open or painting pupils onto the photographic print, and many early images (especially tintypes and ambrotypes) have a rosy tint added to the cheeks of the corpse.

Later examples show less effort at a lifelike appearance, and often show the subject in a coffin. Some very late examples show the deceased in a coffin with a large group of funeral attendees; this type of photograph was especially popular in Europe and less common in the United States.

I knew nothing of this practice, one which seems so macabre by today's standards, until I stumbled upon it while searching for something else on YouTube. A lot of the videos contained severe warnings about content (so of course I had to look).

And it's true that on the surface of it, the images seem creepy and provoke a visceral response. We're not used to seeing dead people, except perhaps at open-casket funerals. Not used to seeing them arranged like furniture or braced so they could stand up beside their living kin.

But some sites devoted to this strange practice claim (correctly, I think) that post-mortem photography reflects a fascinating and very significant cultural shift in attitudes toward mortality. Death was much closer then, and less sanitized; people died in their beds, were washed and dressed and prepared for burial by loved ones. The camera was magic in those days, a way to paint an instant portrait, but not to be used lightly due to scarcity and cost (i.e. no one owned a camera then; you went to a portrait studio in your best clothing, stood very still, and didn't smile).

The babies are the saddest, of course. Victorian women must have gone through agony in their childbearing years, with primitive or non-existent obstetrics, high mortality rates and a complete absence of birth control. Almost everyone would lose an infant, more likely several. Were people more hardened to loss back then? I doubt it. They had to put their grief somewhere, just as we have to today.

They needed something to hold on to, a memento.  Because there were no Kodak moments then, no digital cameras or cells or any of the gadgets with which we so casually snap a picture, there would be no record of Junior's first smile or first steps or first day of school.

The post-mortem photograph, the only existing image of a baby or a child or even an adult, would be cherished and preserved for generations (as witness the thousands of images I found on the internet). I can feel the melancholy behind this gesture, the aching grief in the attempt to make a dead infant appear "lifelike". 

These waxen dolls are disturbing, but only if seen through our modern abhorrence of anything to do with death. We die in hospitals now, often alone. Life is prolonged past the point of any real meaning: we do it because we can, which has come to mean that we're supposed to, that there's no other choice. Death is the enemy, to be beaten back as long and fiercely as possible.

People "fight" cancer, "triumph" over it or "lose the battle". The medical community seems embarrassed by it all. Disease isn't supposed to happen, and if it does, it must be vanquished. I don't think the Victorians thought in terms of losing battles, or even winning. The majority of them were deeply Christian, which means they believed the dead were gathered up by the Almighty and transported to a better place for all eternity.

Spiritualism became tremendously popular in this era, along with the belief that the ghosts of loved ones sometimes appeared in photos.  And they did, if the photographer knew what he was doing.

The Victorians knew that life and death were separated not by a doorway or a passageway but by a gossamer veil, something the merest breeze could draw aside. These eerie portraits of life-in-death convey a sense of dwelling in that mysterious other world even while still embodied on earth. It's a bizarre and even repugnant concept to us, but not to them.

I try to imagine it. It's hard to go there, to put myself there. I wonder what it would be like to touch a dead baby, to tenderly position it for a portrait under blazing lights, to hold its likeness close for years and years while other children came and went.

Their haunted eyes seem to stare at us through time, through space, even through the mists of death itself.

BLOGGER'S NOTE. Many of these photos have been blogged and reblogged, pinned and repinned so many times that it was impossible for me to discover their true provenance, which fills me with regret. There was a time when these pictures were incalculably precious to someone and, in fact, irreplaceable. Try to see them in that light.

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Make me an instrument

It has come home to me once again that life can be overwhelmingly difficult, even crushing. I see, looking back, that I have a certain tendency to be, uh, er, critical. Or negative. Or not celebratory enough. I need to correct this, but I don't know if I will.

I know several situations in which people have suffered an almost incomprehensible grief, in particular a mother whose small daughter died on Christmas Eve two years ago, her snow-covered sled hit by a truck turning a blind corner. My granddaughter was her best friend, and she still talks about her, misses her terribly.

Jesus, God, are you there? I did used to believe, quite fervently, but since I left the church, I don't know. I don't believe there is a God who gets us out of trouble. No Big Guy in the Sky, no lucky rabbit's foot. Faith is not a lottery, and God doesn't give us the things we ask for just because he's nice like Santa, or loves us, or thinks we deserve special favor. In fact, there may be nothing there that helps us, independent of other people and their goodness, or the strength implanted deep down in our own hearts.

Is that, then, what we call God? I don't know. I look out my window today, and I see cedars tossed angrily, shivering as if traumatized. Then they are still again. I need to go out in it so I can order flowers for my daughter's mother-in-law, who has just had successful heart surgery and is recovering by leaps and bounds. (God - ?) I need to look for Christmas presents for my four dear ones, my little grandkids, without whom I - well, let's not finish that thought. And I haven't even started, can't get started because I haven't the heart.

I can't get going. We have this dim understanding, maybe. Or else we don't need it, I don't know. I can't leave life alone, I pick it apart. It's no use, of course. The good is the good, but there is a dangerous estrangement in my own family that I fear will blow us apart at some point. It has happened before, in that other family I grew up in, and I know it is never repaired.

If I let this particular weight press all the life out of me, it would be difficult to continue at all. I know I am blessed, tremendously blessed, compared to others - but how can we compare, when everyone's life is so complex? No one knows what is going on in the mind of another. This is called existential loneliness, and it is built into the species. But I am convinced some people feel it far more than others.

I was looking for an image a few nights ago when my daughter updated me on the mother who lost her child at Christmas. Since then, she has suffered several wrenching twists. Even though I officially don't believe in prayer because God let me down so badly, I lit a candle in my computer room and turned out the lights. The effect was eerie, a glowing screen and a guttering candle. I wanted something to focus on, googled up the name of the little girl who died, and came up with multiple images of a Catholic saint. Small children wore crowns made of holly and candles and walked in solemn processions down the aisles of huge churches.

Somehow this led to St. Francis and his famous prayer, "Make me an instrument of thy peace. . . "

St. Francis, batty as a loon, may have been on to something. Today he'd be put on antipsychotics and resocialized, though he might still end up under a bridge. Still his prayer persists, that is, if he wrote it at all. Truth is so slippery, so humanly influenced. We make things the way we want, or need, or desperately desire them to be. Truth gets lost, we get lost, and we grab. Still, we grab.

Grizzly Man Timothy Treadwell death footage

Contrary to past reports, there is indeed a secret video record of the death of Timothy Treadwell. It's so secret I'm posting it here right now.

Obviously, it was a mismatch, and the salmon inevitably went to Boo Boo the Bear.

The sillies who tread on the lines

OK, so the photo is faked. Or at least, it's not really Timothy Treadwell.

But it's a photo of someone, probably Grizzly Adams. This is a trained bear however, a professional bear, and the ones Treadwell hung out with were decidedly not.

His thrill came from getting as close as he could to the rogue animals, some of them huge, all of them unpredictable, in Katmai National Park in Alaska. I don't know where that is either, except to say (and this is truly incredible) that the slight, effeminate, and outright crazy-sounding Treadwell spent every summer with these bears for 13 years and never once came to harm.

That is. . .until one of them ate him alive.

I found a photo, perhaps spurious, called "Timothy Treadwell Autopsy," which is one of the most gruesome things I have ever seen. It shows a mangled human torso with no arms or head and one leg, bent at the knee and still wearing a shoe. This looked real enough that I think it was somebody who had been partially eaten by something, or otherwise badly mangled.

I saw the fascinatingly deadpan, almost tongue-in-cheek Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man a few years ago. It was spellbinding, but also very, very strange. Treadwell himself was an untreated bipolar and sober alcoholic/drug addict who claimed his passion for the bears had saved him from suicide. He was also a compulsive attention-seeker and failed actor whose angst and foolhardy impulses came across dramatically in his narration: using a tripod-mounted video camera, he recorded all the breathtaking sights and sounds of what he called the Grizzly Maze. Supposedly, he was compiling footage for a nature program (a la Crocodile Hunter) which never materialized, perhaps due to his insane habit of getting close enough to the massive, impersonally violent beasts to touch them on the nose.

He was lunch on legs, and he knew it, so that the end of the story was both horrible and inevitable. My somewhat morbid interest in Treadwell has recently been re-ignited by a fascinating 8-part TV documentary series called Grizzly Man Diaries. This program depicts the leisurely unfolding of daily life in the wild and features some of Treadwell's saner and more insightful commentary. I think it's far superior to Werner Herzog's fatalistic, wildly prejudiced production, with Herzog's funereal narration delivered with a completely emotionless, oppressive German accent.

Even the music on the TV series is evocative, with lazy, golden guitar chords illustrating those long afternoons running with the wild foxes, and dark cello music for the bears, shadow-shapes looming, massive and fundamentally threatening. Excerpts from his diary, read in a completely different kind of voice, are sometimes poignant and insightful. Someone has gone to great effort to present the saner and more poetic side of Treadwell.

The man who walked with the grizzlies was killed and partially eaten (along with his girl friend, likely functioning as a beard: Treadwell kept saying things like, boy it sure would be easier to be gay, oh yeah, you could just go to a truck stop for relief, too bad I'm not gay!, and shit like that) during his 13th season. He had stayed a little too late, the bears were extra hungry, and he was definitely pushing the envelope. Leaving food out in the open, not fencing off his camp, walking right up to the hulking beasts and talking to them in a high, silly, effeminate voice: these weren't the actions of a seasoned naturalist or even a hunter. They were, to be honest, the behaviour of a suicidal nut case who over and over again said he knew that the bears were eventually going to catch up with him and destroy him.

I don't think I could have coped with the real Treadwell. His "straight" life between bear seasons must have been pretty awful. He wrote a book and somehow wangled appearances on Letterman and elsewhere, but conservationists railed against him for his lunatic risks. He wasn't St. Francis of fucking Assisi, for God's sake, though he fancied himself to be the alpha male, the sheer force of his personality dominating even the massive, swaggering boars who could mount any female they wanted.

Something leaped into my head today, a verse by A. A. Milne, inventor of the world's most famous bear. It seems almost eerily appropriate.

Whenenever I walk in a London street,

I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;

And I keep in the squares,

And the masses of bears,

Who wait at the corners all ready to eat

The sillies who tread on the lines of the street

Go back to their lairs,

And I say to them, "Bears,

Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"

Didja ever send an e-mail to a dead guy?

OK. This entry just about shows you where I am spiritually, not to mention on the friendship level: I just sent an e-mail to a guy whom I am almost certain is dead.

I mean! Can't I do something silly once in a while? Can't I grasp at vapour, send arrows into the void? For this guy, maybe.

It was one of those wildly unlikely friendships that sprang up overnight, and it was during one of the most trying, even overwhelming times in my whole life. We would meet at Starbuck's, and very soon his sardonic humour (often blacker than black) would make me laugh myself teary-eyed.

(Excuse me - have to go grab a cup of Red Rose tea. This post has nothing to do with anything.)

Anyway, this guy, he kind of had everything wrong with him. His health, I mean. He carried it around with him, and I worried. But he didn't talk about it much. Preferred to make gruesome cracks about the joys of depression and the futility of visiting psychiatrists, who would say things like, "You look fine to me", when you were obviously at death's door.

Hey, my friend, at some point a few years ago, your e-mail didn't work any more, and I had your phone number but was afraid to ask your wife, "Is Raymond still alive?" I still have a book of his, it's in my front room cupboard right now waiting, for what I can't say. Friendships like this blow in with force, then melt in the fog of inevitability. Don't they? This guy knew Sylvia Plath (not personally!), and when I handed him my version of the poem Daddy (called Daddy II), he winced, and guffawed, and groaned in all the right places. He "got" it.

To be loved is lovely, but relatively commonplace. But to have someone "get" you - I mean really "get you" - how often does that happen in a lifetime?

So what's the deal here? Is he dead? Is he? I just tried about seven potential addresses and e-mailed him to ask if he was alive or not, and am waiting for it to bounce back at me, as everything seems to bounce back these days.

Where does everything go? Where are the people? I look around me, and my life seems as white and bleached as a pure untouched sheet of paper.

Raymond?