As anyone who's seen The Others knows, photography was a less-than-common thing in Victorian England, and it wasn't unusual for families to prop up/lay out the bodies of recently deceased relatives to snap their pictures. In a lot of cases, especially those of children and babies, a photograph was the only reminder of them the family would have, or it was the only photograph they ever had taken. The bodies were usually well-dressed and groomed for the photos.
Perfect example. See her? Dead.
I like this particular photo a lot. Partly because of the drop of something coming out of the girl's nostril, marring the image the photographer was going for of a perfectly healthy and very much alive little girl who happens to suffer from acute flashbulb-induced narcolepsy. Partly because the girl looks a lot like my currently very much alive friend Petra.
Hm. I smell a cheesy supernatural suspense thriller plot in there somewhere.
This image, by the way, comes from Sleeping Beauty, one of the very very VERY few books published about Victorian memorial/death photography. You'd be lucky to find a copy these days for less than four hundred dollars, because life is not fair. Fortunately, there's a very reasonably priced sequel. Somethin' for the ol' Amazon Wishlist.
Of course, all of this has only reignited my interest in Victorian psychiatric photography, which probably an even harder itch to scratch. Kind of uncouth to published volumes of the forced portraits of long-dead British madmen these days.
