Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Public DomainĪn intriguing thing about the spread of Victorian-era death myths is that they are not ancient history. A tintype from 1870 when stands were sometimes used to help prevent movement, which could cause blurring. If you set a corpse-rigor mortis would have needed to set in just the right way-on a posing stand, it would certainly topple over. “They weren’t made for or sturdy enough to actually hold up the weight of a dead body,” Zohn says. More damningly, they’re not counterbalanced. Though they’re made of cast iron, they’re not particularly sturdy or heavy, weighing perhaps 20 or 25 pounds. Posing stands, Zohn explains, are similar to microphone and guitar stands. Earlier chemical processes made colors appear differently (blue eyes could come out as white) and exposure might leave limbs dark in order to make the face clear. Other so-called postmortems are often assumed to be of dead people because something seems “spooky.” Too-stiff posture, unnatural-looking eyes, or eerie shadows can easily start a photo’s postmortem career, and much of this supposed evidence is, again, just evidence of an older photography system. The photo is of author Lewis Carroll, taken years before he died. “Notice the way the photographer has positioned the man’s arm in order to support the head?” the author asks.
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In it, a man reclines in a chair, his face resting on his hand.
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In a post ostensibly showing Victorian postmortem photos, number eight on the list is an image that has been passed around many corners of the Internet-Viralnova quotes the photo source as Tumblr. Mike ZohnĪccording to the website Viralnova, they also had posable corpse arms. So they had posing stands.” A Victorian posing stand. But an exposure of even one second is long enough to allow for blurring. “When people talk about long exposure, it sounds like people had to wait for half an hour,” Zohn says. By the 1850s, they were three to eight seconds. By 1839, when the daguerreotype was invented, the longest exposures were a minute and a half. Initially, he explains, exposure time could be half an hour or an hour-but this was for landscapes, never for portraiture. “ is a deceiving term,” says Mike Zohn, a longtime photographer and the owner of Obscura Antiques in New York. Posing stands were used to help living models hold still for that era’s longer exposures, though even that is misleading.
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In truth, the propped-up people in Victorian “postmortems” look alive for a much simpler reason: They are. A photographer appears to photograph himself, with a large-view camera and an adjustable head clamp apparatus. Though unfortunate, it’s also understandable: There’s clearly something compelling about a lurid, not-so-distant culture engaging with death in a way we don’t. They fill online galleries of Victorian oddities and accumulate on Pinterest and Instagram-even otherwise reputable websites have contributed to the myths. Or so the story goes.įake postmortem photos, whether categorized in error or intentionally mislabeled to sell for profit, have in recent years become widespread on the Internet. These stands helped corpses look alive, and allowed them to be posed with their still-breathing family members. Because Victorians died young, died quickly, and died of injuries and infections modern medicine helped abolish, they invented elaborate grieving rituals to give meaning to their loved ones’ ephemeral lives.Īll of this happening at the same time as advances in photography led to the prevalence of postmortem photos, where Victorians would haul out their dead, prop them up on stands, and take a picture worth a thousand words. Victorian England had a unique relationship with death.