Here's the website link I mentioned, on 19c post-mortem photography: http://ame2.asu.edu/projects/haunted/ISA%20index/book%20of%20the%20dead/book%20of%20the%20dead%20photos.htm
[If you can't get that link to cut and paste, google "haunted rains victorian photography".)
It would be useful to think about the extent to which an elegaic poem serves the same function as a memento mori (= memory of the dead). The photo offers a "realistic" portrait of the loved one, to aid in recalling what s/he looked like. Yet, as we discussed, the conventionality of photography itself imposes a reading, an interpretation, upon that vision (through devices like the frame, the vertical or horizontal aspect ratio, the way the face and body are aligned, the studio props). What are the conventions of elegy, and how do they push forward certain ways of understanding a particular loss?
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I took a history of photography class last year, which also covered the phenomena of "death portraits" during this time period. It's interesting to note that not all of the portraits attempted to pose the dead as merely sleeping, but would sometimes pose them elaborately to show them reading or sewing (two examples that I saw in class). The only indicator to show that these were death portraits were notes on the side of the portrait, something like, "louisa may matthews, dead seven days."
Pretty creepy stuff. If i manage to find a link to any of these "living dead" images, I'll post it here.
And here's some info on a more recent photographic artist's effort to document the dead subject: Elizabeth Heyert's 2005 book, The Travelers, which focuses on a Harlem funeral home. See
http://houkgallery.com/heyert-travellers/heyert.html
(Tracking down this reference alerted me to Heyert's earlier series, "The Sleepers," which is absolutely, positively, Whitmanian: http://houkgallery.com/heyert02/heyert1.html)
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