“Little by little, the dead cease to exist”
Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, 1993
The most common question I’m asked when people find out what it is that I do is simple. “Why?”
‘Collecting post mortem photography’ isn’t top of the hobby list for most people. But I’ve been fascinated by the subject for years and have been writing The Skull Illusion since December 2010. The site has attracted a loyal following since the very beginning, which makes me think that maybe I’m not quite the odd one out after all.
In its early days, the cost of photography put it out of the reach of most people and photos were taken only on very special occasions – a person could live to a ripe old age having had only one or two portraits taken.
At the same time, infant mortality rates were very high and parents were understandably eager to utilise this new art form to create keepsake images of their lost children.
It’s therefore quite understandable that the art of post mortem photography flourished during this time – it also explains why there are many more child post mortem photographs in circulation than adult ones.
In our modern age we are conditioned to avoid (and in consequence, fear) death. Most of us have very little contact with the dying – at the time of writing I am forty two years old and have yet to see a dead body ‘in the flesh’.
I still have both my parents and one grandmother, the rest of my predecessors having considerately died neatly of illness or old age whilst in the care of other people and thus absolving me of any responsibility towards their mortal remains.
The only exception was my maternal grandfather, who died in a nursing home when I was in my twenties. I took care of the arrangements, as my mother was on holiday at the time and Gran was in no fit state to deal with the practicalities.
I was genuinely surprised at just how sanitised the entire procedure was. I was arranging the disposal of a dead human being, yet not once did I have to deal with anything even faintly icky. It involved simply carrying bits of paperwork between different departments of officialdom and deciding on buffet options for the wake.
The funeral director did offer the option of viewing ‘the body’ but Gran didn’t want to. That was another thing that bemused me – the minute my granddad had passed away he was demoted from being ‘Albert, husband of Emily’ to merely ‘the body’.
I envy the Victorians their pragmatic approach to death, along with their automatic assumption that the deceased would be kept at home and cared for lovingly by their family until the funeral service took place. An interesting aside is that our modern ‘living rooms’ are so named because in time gone by they were literally the room in which the living sat, as opposed to the parlour – aka the ‘death room’ - in which your late Uncle Charlie might be laid out.
Another factor in the development of my morbid curiosity was having kids. As soon as you are a parent, the worst thing in the world that could happen to you is the death of your child. There is no fear quite like that associated with realising that you are entirely responsible for the safety of this little person – the world is filled with previously unnoticed deathtraps.
Knowledge is power, and my automatic reaction to anything that scares me has always been to find out as much about it as possible. Understanding that death is the fate that none of us can avoid goes a long way towards assuaging pointless fear.
However, this psychological approach is only part of the reason I curate the Skull. Many of these photographs are simply and undeniably beautiful, their eerie serenity at odds with the fact that we are looking at a dead person.
Tellingly, if people ask what I do for a living I tend to reply simply that I am a blogger. As much as I’d love to be open about my work I have had too many unpleasant reactions to telling people that I (in their interpretation) ‘collect photos of dead people’. There is often an assumption that I get some sort of sick pleasure from looking at the images, which misses the point entirely.
That said there is inevitably a certain level of voyeurism involved in my work. Looking at a person that we are well aware is dead but who is laid as to appear to be sleeping, there is always the thrill of fear which comes with wondering whether their eyes might suddenly blink open and focus on us, the viewer.
In the meantime, all we can do is look, appreciate and remember.
Violet x
Some sections of this post first appeared in an article for The Spooky Isles film site in February 2012.
