Momento Mori

July 23 , 2009 | Posted by admin | In: Pieces of Me

A couple of years ago, after my grandmother passed away, my family and I were going through some of her belongings. My grandmother was a shutterbug, she loved taking pictures. And she kept almost any picture than happened to fall into her possession. So it was kind of cool, despite the circumstances, to be going through all my grandmother’s photographs; she had photos from even before she was born, and I just love old photographs.

I was going through the stack of pictures before me when I happened upon a funeral photo, not too old, maybe from the eighties. It was an elderly man in a coffin. I didn’t recognize him, or at least it wasn’t a photo of someone that I knew. I asked my mother and my aunts, and none of them knew who it was; they only concluded that it was someone granny must have known.

Now, this may seem a little odd, but I like old funeral photos. Mourning portraits, post-mortem photography, momento mori, whatever you want to call it. I like looking at them. These keepsakes were quite something back in the day. Families would sit and pose with their deceased loved ones, sometimes posing the deceased, sometimes propping them up, standing them up, sometimes painting eyes on their closed lids (in the first photo below, the girl’s eyes are painted on and if you look closely the base of the stand that holds her up can be seen behind her feet). Sometimes a rosy tint was added to make them appear more lifelike as well. It seems kind of morbid now, but way-back-when it was the bee’s knees; a lot of times it was one of the few photos a person would have taken. It would was popular to photograph infants that died, it was the only thing to document that they had existed at all.

Anyway, I like them, the old ones, and thought I would share some with you guys. If you have any you want to share, send them to me at durdenjay@gmail.com.

John
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