Post-mortem and memorial photography, although related as a form of remembrance of the dead, differ in focus. Post-mortem photographs record the corpse of the deceased, whereas memorial photographs are usually photographs of the remembered while still alive.
Photography has been used to record the ‘last sleep’ and memorialize the dead since its earliest days. It is no coincidence that much photographic theory, for instance that of Roland Barthes, links photography to death.
It was not unusual for Victorian photographers to advertise their particular skills in this area of photography. Post-mortem daguerreotypes, especially of children, survive in quite large numbers and are now sought-after collectors' items. Often the subject is carefully laid out as if asleep, perhaps in a crib or in the arms of bereaved parents, and beautifully dressed: a final presentation to the world. In a period of high mortality the deathbed photograph, frequently by an anonymous local photographer, might be the only record of the deceased. Some images are of the highest aesthetic and technical quality, such as Southworth & Hawes's full-plate daguerreotype of an unidentified child c. 1850, while others are humble and barely competent tintypes. Nonetheless they all fulfil the same social function. In many cases they derive their iconography from earlier forms of memorial engraving and funeral art, or reflect the 19th-century taste for sentimental pictures (expressed photographically in images such as Henry Peach Robinson's Fading Away (1858) ).
Stylistic shifts reflect both changing social attitudes to death and developments in photographic technology. Photographs on memorials appeared in the mid-19th century and remain a common sight in Catholic countries—their faded and ‘period’ look is part of the narrative of community within graveyards and ossuaries. Graveside photographs, although always part of the genre (there are some graveside stereocards), had become more common by the end of the 19th century, and photographic attention was increasingly concentrated on the material culture of death, the coffins, flowers, and tombstones.
The use of photography in mortuary practices and memorialization differs between cultures, reflecting specific attitudes to death. In many places photographs have been absorbed into funeral ritual. In Russia, they are carried in procession behind an open coffin. Elsewhere in Europe, they are incorporated into the material culture of funerals, on urns or in floral tributes. By the late 19th century the Maori peoples of New Zealand had absorbed photographs of the ancestors into tangi (funerary ritual). In Japan photographs of dead soldiers were hung over the entrances to temples and large photographs adorn coffins. In the West Indies, group photographs of the family at funerals are common; and in 1960s London, Brixton photographer Harry Jacobs took photographs of members of the West Indian community in their coffins for their families. In Ghana, photographs are often made of the family gathered around the deceased, laid out and decorated, not only as a final photograph but to show how well tended the body has been. In Java, it is normal to photograph family and friends looking down at the corpse. Many family albums include photographs of the dead, the final part of the narrative of human life usually missing in Western albums. If it does exist, the images tend to be hidden for private viewing, rather than being displayed in the album, although an important contemporary use of post-mortem photography is in the context of grief counselling and therapy in cases of stillborn and neonatal death.
Photography has also been used to document and explore the process and experience of death by anthropologists, documentary photographers, scientists, and artists. Some projects have been extremely controversial, for instance Andres Serrano's large colour images from the New York morgue, and the exhibition The Dead at the National Museum of Photography, Film, and TV, Bradford, in 1995. Photographs of the dead, such as those of the corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons released in 2003, are frequently the subject of heated correspondence in newspapers. But levels of tolerance vary between cultures. For example, the ‘nota roja’ (‘bloody news’) pictures of murders and traffic accidents by the Mexican photojournalist Enrique Metinides would probably not be publishable in most European countries.
Attitudes to photographs of the dead shift with attitudes to death itself and respect for the integrity of the individual. The post-mortem and memorializing functions of photographs are related to photography's inherent indexical qualities, its ability to secure the shadow as the substance fades, to cheat the finality of death. Alternatively they remind us of the fragility of life.
— Elizabeth Edwards
Bibliography
- Danforth, L., and Tsiaras, A., The Death Rituals of Greece (1982).
- Ruby, J., Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America (1995).
- Williams, V., and Hobson, G., The Dead (1995)
