• Memento Mori Meaning

Photography owes much of its early flourishing to death. Not in images depicting the aftermath of violent crimes or industrial accidents. Instead, through quiet pictures used to comfort grieving friends and relatives. These postmortem photographs, as they are known, were popular from the mid-19th through the early-20th centuries—common enough to grace mantelpieces. Many can be viewed anew at online resources like the Thanatos Archive.

Memento Mori Meaning

Post-mortem photography (also known as memorial portraiture or a mourning portrait) is the practice of photographing the recently deceased. Various cultures use and have used this practice, though the best-studied area of post-mortem photography is that of Europe and America. Back when photography was a starting art form, it was expensive and laborious that it was (often) only in death when a person gets photographed. These post-mortem photos or memento mori, which is Latin for “remember that you will die,” serves as treasured keepsakes, a valuable remembrance of a deceased loved one.

Historians estimate that during the 1840s, the medium’s first decade, as cholera swept through Britain and America, photographers recorded deaths and marriages by a ratio of three to one. Budding practitioners had barely learned to handle the bulky machinery and explosive chemicals before they were asked to take likenesses of the dead: to bend lifeless limbs into natural poses and mask tell-tale signs of sickness, racing against rigor mortis.

Many people find photos of the dead creepy or morbid. No question, postmortem photographs are sorrowful images. They capture the ravages of illness. They depict grieving parents. They show wives caressing the faces of lost husbands, just for a chance to be tender toward them one last time. And they portray unbearably beautiful children, poised as if asleep, surrounded by the toys they played with while alive. But today, the sorrow of these images lies elsewhere: in treating pictures of the dead like obscenities rather than as memento mori.

'Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has cast up in my time or is like to -- this art by which even the poor can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones.'
from a letter by Jane Welsh Carlyle, 1860

From our place in the early 21st century it is difficult to imagine what the world was like in the second half of the 19th century. Infant mortality was very high and many children were lost before a photograph could be made. Childbirth took many young women and epidemics of disease could decimate entire families. It was not uncommon for the photographer to be called when a family member was near death or had died. Some photographers advertised a specialty in 'Post Mortem Photographs'.

We did not set out to collect post mortems but over the years we have found some haunting, compelling images. They are such an important part of photography's impact on the 19th century world that we have collected some. Here we share a selection of these images.