[deanmine]

Death Portraits were popular back n the day

[deanmine]

more

[vagabond]

Jeeze- some of 'em you can't tell whose dead!

[deanmine]

Originally Posted by vagabond ↗

Jeeze- some of 'em you can't tell whose dead!

its difficult to pose with a corpse i think.

[vagabond]

I never would- way too morbid. Those poor kids!

[BryanXavier]

That last one - I'm thinking that the mother died giving birth to the triplets who died as well.

The poor husband/father, if that's the case.

Updated - One child survived.

This photo shows the mother and the dead babies, except for the third child from left to right. The woman had a triplets pregnancy complicated and labor worse, which lasted several hours. In the end, his wife and two of their babies did not resist. What survived was created by his uncles.

[deanmine]

Originally Posted by BryanXavier ↗

One child survived.

thank you very much for that backstory..

[deanmine]

ok, I just learned that the pics with the mothers under a cloths..
turns out there alive and its a common practice back then to hold the child still for a pic

[deanmine]

a now redundant practice: to cloak or hide a parent within the background of a child’s portrait, a common procedure from the advent of photography up until the 1920s, when exposure times were relative slow, and a hidden parent was required to hold the child still.

These hidden mothers can be discerned in the background of every one of these portraits – looming behind their children, swaddled in blankets, carpets and brocades as they support their progeny as the central subject. The iterations vary, and in some instances the hidden mother is revealed as a single hand, while in others the child is seated on a shrouded figure, or the parent is quite literally hiding – ensuring that the child’s identity is transposed over their own.

The images hold a certain degree of comedy – albeit unintentional – because the viewer is asked to suspend their disbelief, to ‘not see’ the hidden figure. Some contemporary onlookers would have simply not seen the portrait’s hidden mother, indicative of the cultural nature of the act of seeing. For other viewers, the hidden figure was an essential part of the picture: high infant mortality rates meant that posthumous portraits were the norm, and thus the hidden mother would signify to the viewer that this child was alive.

[vagabond]

Yeah, the "MM" stuff creeps me out!