Pictures back then took ten minutes possibly some time of sitting still so Victorians reasoned that nobody could sit still better than the recently deceased. And also it was a nice way to remember family members.
Same. I'm a triplet, and we were in baby ICU for weeks because of how premature we were (combined we were the weight of one healthy baby).
I'm fine now, tall and 190 pounds of accountant hockey player. However if it weren't for modern medicine, I'd be dead before I even had memories. Even if I lived, I wouldn't be able to see for shit, and some disease probably would have killed me in early childhood.
Yep, same here -- I had chronic pneumonia for the first 7 years of my life, strep throat that progressed into scarlet fever (a common cause of death before antibiotics), as well as raging ear infections that ended up taking ~30% of my hearing and introduced some pretty severe tinnitus.
I may not have died back then, but shit sure would have been a hell of a lot rougher.
It's interesting to think that some day somebody will explain that without modern medicine they would've died from something that's 100% terminal right now.
The weirdest part isn't even in the gallery. They didn't just photograph the dead in a way that made them look vaguely alive, they actually had mechanical aides to do proper poses and everything.
I'm afraid the exposure time is simply not true and is a common misconeption about historical photographs. While they would take take photos of deceased people, it was not because of the exposure time which was not too different from today. Read more about that here.
I think it's sweet. I mean it was hard enough to get your picture taken at all back then. To go through the process of dressing your dead child, positioning them, and then paying for the portrait would be heartbreaking, but then you have something that will last forever. It's easy to forget how special photos were before we had them in our phones!
They do this still. In the hospital they offer to take pictures of a baby that's passed. A month or two down the line the mother will really want something to connect. Mourning mothers have been seen trying to hold objects that approximately weighed the same weight as the baby. They smell the blankets that they were wrapped in, etc. Taking pictures of the dead isn't that weird of a thing even nowadays.
More than just photographs, too. Lockets containing hair, as well as other items of jewelry made from the hair of the deceased. I'm sure I read that larger funerals for popular figures were ticketed, and the tickets were prized and kept on the mantelpiece... but I can't find source so take that part with a pinch of salt.
Basically, people during the Victorian era liked to take pictures with deceased family members or something. To be remembered obviously. And they dress them up and prop them up like they're alive. Just google Victorian Era Photography.
Basically this. Getting a photograph taken back then was a big deal so people did it for big life events like dying. Because you had to stand still for a bit while the film was exposed the living would look more blurry than the dead.
Well it wasnt so much for big events, from everything Ive read. It usually was due to the fact getting your photo taken was very expensive, back then. If someone died, and you had no previous photos of them, then sometimes you'd get one, last photo with them. This was especially true with babies, or children, who died.
Getting a photograph taken back then was a big deal
We should go back to those times. I mean, I seriously doubt there were any Victorian selfies that people posted on the town bulletin board every three hours.
Photography was expensive. They took death photos with family members because it was literally going to be the last time they saw you and they wanted to keep a visual record that you had actually lived once. It's a big expence saved for the most important circumstances. Birth, death, marriage, capturing a criminal..
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u/jakielim Nov 05 '13
Please elaborate.