Momento Mori Victorian Death Photographs

Momento Mori literally means remember your mortality in Latin. Momento Mori is considered to be a genre of art that I believe probably originated during the Great Plagues of Europe.

In Victorian times, families took care of their dead before the advent of funeral homes and undertaking procedures. Living rooms are no longer called "parlors", because "parlors" were for viewing of the dead. This is a direct aversion to the twentieth century fear of death. We no longer live with our dead loved ones sleeping in the box in the living room. We no longer take pictures of our dead to remind ourselves they are gone. Its an important part of the mourning process we have lost. Its not as common to lose a baby, a young child, or a young adult with advances in medical care that began in the nineteenth century. We look at death as a failure, not a permanent sleep and a release from the pain of sickness or disease. It was more of a common thing Victorian folks and those before them dealt with at home. The grieving process was done at home, and people were not so far removed from it. A dead body was nothing to be associated with morbidity, it was a fact of life, death, that people were unafraid to deal with.

Small children were photographed with a dead family member. Parents were photographed holding their dead babies, and children. Children were gathered around their grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles to photograph their loved ones with them for the last time. Often trinkets such as lockets were fashioned with a last memory of their loved one's picture inside to remind them this person is dead and gone, in a beautiful permanent sleep away from pain or sickness, forever in a state of blissful sleep.

Photographs often portrayed their dead as just that, sleeping, or with their eyes open, fixed in a peaceful pose, as if in pensive thought or a trans, a state not here, but with us, quietly watching and waiting for the ferryman to take them down the River of Styx to the land of the dead.