Early Photography

At first when I took a look at the list provided of early photographers and early movements in photography, the words 'Sleeping Babies' stood out to me. Somehow, the words 'post-mortem' didn't seem to click in my brain. I immediately thought of all of those endearing pictures of babies sleeping in rose petals, hanging in make-shift scarf hammocks and dozing soundly inside of small baskets. However, to my extreme disappointment, after typing 'post-mortem photography' into Google, the results astonished me! Dead people...and dead babies! These photos take the whole dead babies joke thing to a whole new level, I'm not gonna lie.

Post-Mortem photography is the practice of taking photographs of the recently deceased. (That's right, I mean dead). It was first used in the 1800's, but rose to it's height in popularity during the 19th century when Carte-de-Visite was first invented (printing multiple photographs from just one negative). Carte-de-Visite allowed families to take pictures of the recently lost loved ones, print multiple copies, and mail them out to family members who never got to see them. Usually these pictures were taken of dead children, or babies; so I suppose that's where the 'Sleeping Babies' connotation lies. They were usually posed to look as if they were in a deep sleep...or even worse...posed to look alive. I came across quite a few pictures of dead kids with their eyes pinned open. -goosebumps!- I personally find this demented and don't know why you'd want to see a picture of your dead relative. Not seeing them at all seems a heck of a lot better than seeing them dead. But maybe that's just me. Luckily, this type of photography has pretty much died out in North America. By the beginning of the 20th century, 'snapshot' photography had become the new fad, which decreased the demand for post-mortem photography.

If you've ever seen the movie The Haunting in Connecticut, you've been exposed to this type of photography. The movie flashes through several post-mortem photos during the seance flashback scenes. Creepy stuff. Kind of mysteriously artistic though.

Anyways! I'm going to provide a link here to a blog of my favorite infant photographers ever! The sisters Tracy Raver and Kelley Ryden. They were both co-authors of the book Sleeping Beauties (you can purchase it on Amazon for a great price here - I'm not kidding, I own this book) which is just full of their best photography so far. They only photograph infants under two weeks of age! (Yes, I mean really sleeping babies not dead ones!)