The Quickening of the Dead and the Dying of Death: Postmortem Photographs from Nineteenth-Century America

by Suhjung Hur

"Photography" and "death" seem, at first sight, separate, unrelated words. Even cursory contemplation of a photographic portrait, however, discloses the surreptitious kinship linking the two. Recognizing that the human subject of a photographic portrait is paradoxically "dead and . . . going to die,"¹ Barthes poignantly bears witness to the relationship between photography and death. By perpetuating in a print what was once before the camera but no longer is, both in terms of time and space, photography is initially a nostalgic, and ultimately an "elegiac," art.

This inherent kinship between death and photography is revealed most explicitly and poignantly in nineteenth-century American postmortem photographs. Initially made to memorialize the dead as part of the mourning process, postmortem pictures play a wider ambivalent role in their embodiment of death and denial of it.

The three postmortem photographs in the Seaver Center collection are ambrotypes taken during the second half of the nineteenth century. They share similar characteristics: they are the pictures of children; children all look alive rather than dead, presented as if sleeping or sitting in an armchair. Yet, such semblance of vitality and of subject-matter was not uncommon in these representations. That children provided the major subject of this practice is probably because of the high infant mortality of the period. Also, postmortem photography offered a last chance for the remaining family to record an image of the departed one. In the service of this device, photographers made every effort to make the death look "natural" or the dead agreeably alive.

Indeed, sleep is certainly the most natural, easiest, and historically sanctioned way of depicting death.² However, postmortem photography began to represent a dead child in a new and different way. In addition to depicting the child as if sleeping, he or she was now photographed in his/her Sunday best, often seated in an armchair, or on a bed with eyes open. A historian, Phillipe Ariès wrote that "parents evidently desired to represent their dead children in all kinds of attitudes in order to express their intense grief and their passionate desire to make their children survive in memory and in art, to exalt the children's innocence, charm, and beauty."³ Childhood and memory were tightly knit together and photography slipped naturally into this conjoinment.

Postmortem photographs also embody the sentimental ambiance of the nineteenth-century America. In the closely interwoven Puritan community of the eighteenth century, the death of a single person, viewed as an immediate loss to the whole community, affected the lives of the others. In the nineteenth century, however, as American society became increasingly complex, the death of an individual lost its communal significance, and emotions that had previously been shared by the community were redirected inward, and restricted to the immediate family.⁴ The family had to bear the grief of loss, and the sorrow consequently became more intensified in this intimate, private circle.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American perception of death changed, a process that was called as the 'dying of death'; American attitudes toward death became that of simple denial. People pushed death away from their lives and alienated the dead in the hospital, into invisibility. In nineteenth-century America, the camera was used not only to celebrate life but also to mourn death. While the latter may no longer be the case, these touching relics from the past will move us to contemplate death and to reflect on our denial of it. The photograph of a dead child forces the viewer to confront not only the death of a loved one but also one's own mortality as mememto mori.

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans., Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 95.
2. In the medieval period, for example, the portrayals of the death scene were often referred to as dormitio (sleep). Other than the "deathbed scene" showing a dying person lying on a bed, the most frequent image of death was that of the Virgin Mary. Phillipe Ariès, Images of Man and Death, trans., Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 94-96.
3. Ibid., 252.
4. See David E. Stannard, "Where All Our Steps are Tending: Death in the American Context," in Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, eds., A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Stony Brook, 1980), 19-23.

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