Ghost Babies

Victorian postmortem photos of children. Morbidly intrigued?

There's a fascinating story on BoingBoing. From said story...

In his seminal study, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, the anthropologist Jay Ruby notes that "the custom of photographing corpses, funerals, and mourners is as old as photography itself." A direct descendant of the posthumous portraits commissioned in earlier centuries by the well-to-do bereaved, the practice was widespread in 19th century America; "secure the shadow, ere the substance fade" was a popular tagline for photographic studios, exhorting customers to preserve lasting images of the near and dear, even if death had already claimed them. As early as 1846, an ad for the Boston photographers Southworth & Hawes proclaimed,

We make miniatures of children and adults instantly, and of Deceased Persons either at our rooms or at private residences. We take great pains to have Miniatures Of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a deep sleep.

Death was a fact of life in the 19th century. Until 1885, childhood mortality took one out of every five children in her first year, two out of every five by their fifth; children were carried off by cholera, dysentery, diphtheria, typhoid, yellow fever, scarlet fever, or measles. Losing all of one's children to an epidemic, in a matter of days, was not uncommon. "From [baby] carriage to coffin was the fate of over 30 percent of 19th century children," writes Stanley Burns, M.D., in his pioneering study, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.

In the 19th century, especially in rural America, families prepared their own dead for burial by laying the body on a board and washing and dressing it for the wake, traditionally held in the front parlor of the family home. Unlike residents of big cities, people who lived outside urban centers typically had no easy access to a photographer; thus, a postmortem photograph was often the only image kinfolk might have to remember a person by.

This was especially the case with children cut down too soon to have had a studio portrait taken. As evidence for the belief that "parents were often desperate to have one picture of their dying child," Ruby includes a copy of the carte de visite of a baby named Florence May Laser, noting, "An adult hand supports the child while on the back of the image someone has written, 'Taken while dying.'"