The Thanatos Archive: Death and Memorial Photography

Postmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These photographs were often the only ones taken of their subjects and much pride and artistry went into them. It is astounding that although postmortem photographs make up the largest group of nineteenth-century American genre photographs, they are largely unseen, and unknown. Today we struggle to avoid the topic of death; as a result we have closed the door on these images, which reflect an American culture in which death and mourning played a visible and active part.

These photographs were a common aspect of American culture; a part of the mourning and memorialization process. Surviving families were proud of these images and hung them in their homes, sent copies to friends and relatives, wore them as lockets or carried them as pocket mirrors. Nineteenth-century Americans knew how to respond to these images. Today there is no culturally normative response to postmortem photographs.

Discussions of death in books are prolific, and we are accustomed to images of death as part of our daily news; but actual death, as a part of private lives, has become a shameful and unspoken subject.



Paintings were the medium by which the rich and famous were memorialized and this practice continued throughout the nineteenth century. Photography made a visual iconography available to everyone, thus opening up the sort of immortality that was previously available only to the rich. Postmortem photographs allowed not only for special memorialization, but preserved the images of those who died prematurely and unphotographed.

The simplicity of these pictures makes them some of the most powerful and compelling photographs ever taken.

We make miniatures of children and adults instantly... and of Deceased Persons either at our rooms or at private residences... We take great pains to have miniatures of Deceased Persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to Artists, in a quiet sleep. From an advertisement by a Boston photographer, 1846.

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