
Clearing Up Some Myths About Victorian ‘Post-Mortem’ Photographs - prismatic
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/victorian-post-mortem-photographs
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Nomentatus
What this article leaves out is that unposed photographs of the dead
(particularly children) were common in Victorian times - including in my
family. My grandmother had (and I saw and was able to examine) such a photo of
a dead infant, perhaps two - her sister. Her father, an interior decorator,
was on a buying trip to Germany when the child became ill and died, and this
may have been a factor in preserving a momento mori of the child corpse for
him to see when he returned to London. Cameras weren't very portable, so
taking photographs of a sick child just before death wasn't usually a
possibility, as would be the case today.

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wincy
This was really interesting! Just something I believed because "why not?" and
didn't give it another thought for many years. There's so much information
coming at us from every angle, that if it doesn't have a major impact in my
life, I often don't think critically about the information.

