Several months ago I posted an item about the old practice of
having your picture taken with (recently) dead family members.
Today I encountered an unusual example of the genre; rather than depicting a mother holding a dead infant, it shows a small child on the lap of her dead mother.
However bizarre the image may seem to us today, the rationale of the husband/father is clear - to preserve for the little girl a photo of her being held by her mother. It's rather touching, when you think about it...
The above comments are incorrect; the mother in this photo was alive. See the discussion thread below.
Found at It'll Take the Snap Out of Your Garters.
Not quite as creepy, I have a picture of my mother's family made after her mother died. My mother was 5 and her sister 6 when she died and they didn't have a picture of the four of them together. My mother remembered that her Aunt stood in for the picture and they replaced her head with that from a portrait my grandparents had stood for. I guess it was a 1920's version of photoshopping.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely not! This is not a post mortem (no one in their right mind would put a baby on the lap of a dead person because dead people cannot sit up or hold onto things. This was just a mother who was holding the child to keep it calm while being photographed. She would later have been cropped out by a frame or mat.
ReplyDeleteYou're thinking of "invisible mother" photos - that's a similar but different genre:
Deletehttp://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2011/03/this-appears-to-be-hidden-mother.html
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/01/posted-by-crafty-dogma-at-flickr-via.html
http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2012/05/another-hidden-mother-photo.html
No one in this photo is dead. Don' t believe the blogs and public sites like BuzzFeed that let anyone write anything. The woman is holding her child still for the camera. The plan was to focus on the baby and crop her out. She is looking down to steady the baby and has her fingers folded back to try to keep them out of the photo.
DeleteNot to make anyone angry but if you look at the womans hand they are closed like a fist and darkening of the hands is really bad from death. In Victorian mourning photos they are usually placed near a drape so the person can be held up without being seen, These unfortunate photos were extremely popular. All you have to do is look up mourning photos with dead people and you will see.
ReplyDeleteyes, the mother is dead. She's got what I call "curl hands". And the faces of the dead also seem to droop; because of no muscle tone they look expressionless.
ReplyDeleteUm no. "Curl hands" is not a real thing. She is just trying to keep her fingers away from the photo so that she can mat herself out of the photo after it was printed. I have proof that the mother lived into her 80's. See: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/389209592775683734/ She lived to be 82 years old.
DeleteThank you, Historian 305. I've amended the text of the post.
DeleteCan any of you see the full version of the text on the photo? I would like to read it, but I can only see the name Esther.
ReplyDeleteShe's not dead at all. I fell for this when I first learned about PMs, but mom is very much alive. Her intention was to probably be cropped out of the photo with a mat so her expression would be irrelevant.
ReplyDeleteNot dead. Stop spreading misinformation on the web.
ReplyDelete