Post Mortem Portrait Archive, Part Six

More From My Post-Mortem Portrait Archive:

Once again it is time to present a few more images from my Post Mortem Portrait collection. These are some wonderful examples of amateur, or non-studio portraits. Again, almost all of these portraits are of children, one of the most common forms of this kind of memorial photography. You will see that many are photographed at home or in the family's back yard. Household furniture is often seen as part of the set-up or back-drop. Some even include a family pet hanging around in the background.

 

 

 

  

The last two subjects are obviously much more recent than the previous twelve, which are circa 19th or early 20th century. The predominance of a professional studio portrait was greatly diminished by the mid-20th century and the number of amateur photographs increased as the practice became more private and less acceptable for a professional photographer or studio to advertise or even do. The improvements in photographic technology also made it easier for family members to photograph their loved ones, especially with the advent of the snapshot camera, then the Polaroid, and now the digital camera. The  body in its casket was no longer being "waked" at home, so the setting is now usually the funeral home or church.

Previous postings on Dark Dissolution that included other images from my Post Mortem Portrait Archive are:  "More Scans....", "Morbid Anatomy", "Sleeping Beauties", "Putting the Fun back....", and "Wisconsin Death Trip".

I will post more later, but with a different emphasis; maybe the props used, the clothing, or the setting....

Death Reference Desk - Blog

Death Reference Desk

I came across this amazing reference blog also devoted to DEATH.
It features some great entries and links. It is just over a year old, and very ambitious.
Here's one of thier opening images...my sentiments, exactly.

This summer is c-r-a-z-y, so I apologize for posting this cop-out page, but the Death Reference Desk should easily keep your interest piqued until I get back...

Have a nice summer .... you never know if it will be your last ....  :-)

How Much is Your Dead Body Worth?

In 1998 Hilary Mantel published a great novel based on the life and times of 18th Century Scottish surgeon John Hunter and his anatomist brother William. Hunter was responsible for the original huge collection of pathological specimens now housed at the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. The surgeon was keen to obtain specimens of any and every physiological wonder he could find. In Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien, in 1782 we find that Hunter was pursuing the dying 7 foot 7 inch tall Irish giant, Charles O’Brien (Bryne) in order to obtain his skeleton for his collection. He plied the unwilling O’Brien with promises of a cash advance for his eventual corpse. (see his skeleton in the case: photo at right)

The novel is one of my favorites.

This book paints a detailed picture of the intrigue and almost desperation that was prevalent during these times, when medical science was struggling to advance, but access to human cadavers was scarce. It also describes the intrigue and illegal activity that supported the men of medicine in the 18th and 19th centuries. There was a critical shortage of human cadavers for teaching and research before the Anatomy Act of 1832 opened the poorhouse doors to give access to those too poor to afford a proper burial. Until then, the few legal bodies that were available from hanged criminals were not enough for the growing number of anatomy schools. Soon the Resurrection Men were able to fill the void by grave robbing and body snatching for quick cash. William Burke and William Hare didn’t take long to evolve into murderers when they realized how easy it was to cash in by selling cadavers to Dr. Robert Knox, an ambitious Edinburgh anatomist. In 1828, after 16 murders over an 11-month period, they were caught and Burke was hanged AND anatomized. The verb to be burked or burking entered the English language. Director John Landis is about to complete a new film (2010) — Burke and Hare, one of many such films made about them over the years.

I found a recent documentary film about body snatching that is strangely reminiscent of a 1987 episode, “Body Banks”, of the quirky sci-fi television show Max Headroom. The documentary by the BBC’s Horizon examines the high monetary value of the human remains needed for research, testing, study, and medical transplant and how this results in the illicit trafficking of such remains.

This is all very different from the live organ donations that are much more regulated and controlled by the in-hospital context in which they are harvested. See Organ Donation and Transplantation from the Encyclopedia of Death and Dying website.

BBC/Horizon promotional text for the documentary: How Much is Your Dead Body Worth?

When veteran broadcaster Alistair Cooke died in 2004 few suspected that he was yet to uncover his greatest story. What happened to his body as it lay in a funeral home would reveal a story of modern day grave robbery and helped smash a body-snatching ring that had made millions of dollars by chopping up and selling-off over 1000 bodies. Dead bodies have become big business. Each year millions of people’s lives are improved by the use of tissue from the dead. Bodies are used to supply spare parts, and for surgeons to practice on. Horizon investigates the medical revolution that has created an almost insatiable demand for body parts and uncovers the growing industry and grisly black market that supplies human bodies for a price.

Watch it in its entirety at Top Documentary Films.
How Much Is Your Dead Body Worth?   BBC-UK  49:00 min


***WARNING – Contains Scenes Of Human Dissection and Human Body Parts***
… well worth the watch, though.

Jack Burman: The Dead

Canadian photographer Jack Burman's long awaited book of post mortem portraits, The Dead, is finally here. The Magenta Foundation (Toronto) has published a fine collection of Burman's amazing photographs in three forms: the hardcover edition, hardcover edition in a wooden box, and the deluxe boxed edition with a signed original print.

Martha Hanna (director of the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography) provided a brief introduction, and Robert Enright interviewed Burman for the text. Burman's work spans decades of searching for the humanity of human remains from sites far away from battlefields and streets. He forces us to come face to face with individuals, with the actual dead, not just symbols of the dead. He explores the collections of prepared medical specimens in Latin American and European medical museums.

The wooden box encasing the book is rough, unfinished, except for a transparent gray stain. Its halves fit together tightly, held fast with rare earth magnets, so there is a brief struggle as you attempt to access the book within. The black and white print included in the deluxe edition is small (5.5 inches by 6.5 inches on 10.25 by 7.25 paper) in an edition of 100. It is of a richly detailed, articulated crouching human skeleton entitled Germany #49 (Catatonic Man), 2009.

Although I've seen this kind of subject before (such as in Rosamond Purcell and Stephen Jay Gould's  Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors), many images were a surprise, both in their elegance and their visceral power. The reproduction quality is excellent in spite of the smallish format of the book it self. The size may actually contribute to its intimacy rather than sensationalize its content. I highly recommend this book for the discerning collector of all things macabre.

Victorian Mourning Attire

We have long associated black clothing with funerals and mourning. This tradition has a long history, but the most complex social period in the West seems to have been Victorian. In the 19th century and early 20th, formal signs of mourning were outwardly displayed in the clothing one wore, sometimes for extended periods of time. Not like the one-day garb we wear at contemporary funerals, but as part of one’s everyday life for weeks, months, or, as in the case of good old Queen Vic herself, years.

Tracy Chevalier writes on her site: “Mourning clothes were a family’s outward display of their inner feelings. The rules for who wore what and for how long were complicated, and were outlined in popular journals or household manuals such as The Queen and Cassell’s – both very popular among Victorian housewives. They gave copious instructions about appropriate mourning etiquette. If your second cousin died and you wanted to know what sort of mourning clothes you should wear and for how long, you consulted The Queen or Cassell’s or other manuals.

        For deepest mourning clothes were to be black, symbolic of spiritual darkness. Dresses for deepest mourning were usually made of non-reflective paramatta silk or the cheaper bombazine – many of the widows in Dickens’ novels wore bombazine. Dresses were trimmed with crape, a hard, scratchy silk with a peculiar crimped appearance produced by heat. Crape is particularly associated with mourning because it doesn’t combine well with any other clothing – you can’t wear velvet or satin or lace or embroidery with it. After a specified period the crape could be removed – this was called slighting the mourning. The color of cloth lightened as mourning went on, to grey, mauve, and white – called half-mourning. Jewelry was limited to jet, a hard, black coal-like material sometimes combined with woven hair of the deceased.
        Men had it easy – they simply wore their usual dark suits along with black gloves, hatbands and cravats. Children were not expected to wear mourning clothes, though girls sometimes wore white dresses.
        The length of mourning depended on your relationship to the deceased. The different periods of mourning dictated by society were expected to reflect your natural period of grief. Widows were expected to wear full mourning for two years. Everyone else presumably suffered less – for children mourning parents or vice versa the period of time was one year, for grandparents and siblings six months, for aunts and uncles two months, for great uncles and aunts six weeks, for first cousins four weeks.”

The photographs on this page are from my collection and clearly show such truly elegant fashions.

Other sites to explore: 

Morbid Outlook’s Fashion History: Victorian Mourning Garb
 
An article on Mourning Fashion History by Pauline Weston Thomas for Fashion-Era.com
 
And from a site with musical accompaniment: The Basics of Mourning – Victorian Style.

More scans from my Post Mortem Portrait Archive (Part Five)

Here are a few more images from my collection. They include tintypes from the 1860's and 70's, CDV's and Cabinet photos from the 1870's to 1890's. We often find that the child is posed with or on furniture, either in the photo-studio or at home.

This early tintype has the baby seated in a chair against plain white wall. Sometimes, when the baby needed support for photography, the mother or a studio assistant would place a black hood or cape over themselves, and hold the baby in their lap.

Appropriated for editorial use. Thank you to the owner, whoever that is...

This video is from YouTube, possibly made by a post mortem portrait collector. It has a musical soundtrack, so be forewarned.

A few more prints from my own collection:

 

The use of carriages and bassinets was common, a way to imply that the baby was only asleep, rather than dead.

Along with the usual post mortem portraits, one can find examples of memorial cards that were made available as well. They were usually letterpress text on a black or very dark purple cabinet card sized board. Usually there was no photograph at all, providing a less expensive option to hand out to guests at the funeral.

Other cabinet card sized photographs often included an earlier pre-mortem portrait printed with a stylized vignetting applied so as to indicate that these were memorial photos of the recently deceased. The most common convention in the USA was the scrolled paper edges. (See below, left)

Another option would be to set up the funeral flower arrangements and include a small pre-mortem portrait within the setting. The still life would be photographed and printed as a memorial photo for relatives.

The Body Farm

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WARNING
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Today, this Page contains GRAPHIC photographs of the DEAD.

Proceed only with the understanding that you may be disturbed.

 •   •  •  • • ••••• • ••••• • •  •  •   •

 "A body farm is a research facility where human decomposition can be studied in a variety of settings. The aim is to gain a better understanding of the decomposition process, permitting the development of techniques for extracting information (such as the timing and circumstances of death) from human remains. Body farm research is particularly important within forensic anthropology and related disciplines, and has applications in the fields of law enforcement and forensic science. Four such facilities exist in the United States." (from Wikipedia: link)

The original body farm was at the University of Tennessee Anthropological Research Facility near Knoxville, TN, started by Dr. Bill Bass in 1981. A great article on Dr. Bass can be found at damninteresting.com.

Forensic anthropologist Bill Bass, left, and his co-author, Jon Jefferson, examine a decaying corpse on the Body Farm.
Picture: Caroline Overington

The video below gives you a good introduction to the facility and its history by Dr. Bass, himself.

Even National Geographic has produced a short video on Dr. Bass's work. Their version (with lots of camera jiggle effects) is less graphic than the videos provided below, but it gives a good overview of the facility.  See it at this link.

For a more graphic and detailed account of the Body Farm, also presented by Dr. Bass, see the three parts below. These are more graphic, so advanced warning is given....Viewer Beware!

Part One:

Part Two:

Part Three:

Of course with such a vivid concept of death and decay, it didn't take long for artists and writers to reference the facility within their work. First we find crime mystery writers using it as a backdrop for their stories and characters' lives. See Patricia Cornwell's The Body Farm, and of course Kathy Reichs' character, Dr. Temperance Brennan, who sometimes references the body farm in Reichs' novels (but not so much in the TV series, Bones). The author, herself, has a working knowledge of the body farm, as Dr. Reichs is one of only eighty-two forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology. Even Dr. Bass himself, along with his colleague Jon Jefferson, have collaboratively written crime mystery novels under the pen name Jefferson Bass. Their site also has links to more videos about the body farm.

One visual artist who has worked within the fence line of the body farm is photographer Sally Mann. Her book What Remains examines the mortality and decay of her family dog, the occupants of the body farm, and a fatal incident occurring near her home. A great documentary film was made in 2005 while she produced many of the images within her wonderful book. It is also entitled What Remains. Mann used the archaic 19th century collodion wet plate process in order to create these images on glass plates with a large format view camera. These are a few examples from her book:

(Above three images: copyright Sally Mann. Thanks in advance for their use here.)

The visual and almost tactile qualities of this old analogue process, with all its flaws and apparent image decay, seem well suited to documenting the dark mood and atmosphere of the body farm and its inhabitants, especially in the hands of an artist like Sally Mann.