*shudder*

Wow. I mean, seriously. I learned something about the Victorian era: it's odd.

Here's a pic of what would have been a young, pretty girl of the era:



Yeah she's dead.

And for some time too. It's called postmortem photography. They take dead people, make them look not dead and snap pictures. Sometimes, living members of the family will pose with the less than living members. What gets me, is most of 'em are smiling...

Google it...



Edited by DeTrevni - 23 May 2008 at 8:17am

9 days after she died?

Ugh... Find her dead, clean her up, snap one last picture, ok, but crap that's freaky.

Edit:
Just went to see the Wiki on this and then went to the Wiki on death masks. While a bit creepy on their own, they upped the ante here:

"One such mask, known as L'Inconnue de la Seine, recorded the face of an unidentified young woman who, according to one oft-repeated story, had been found drowned in the Seine River at Paris around the late 1880s. A worker at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he made a plaster cast of her face. She was considered so beautiful that in the following years copies of the mask became a fashionable morbid fixture in Parisian Bohemian society.

The face of Resusci Anne, the world's first CPR training mannequin, introduced in 1960, was modeled after L'Inconnue de la Seine."


That really kind of creeps me out.


Edited by reifidom - 23 May 2008 at 8:31am

Photography was new and expensive, though not as expensive as a oil-painting portrait. So, a lot of families waited to have them done. If you notice, a lot of the dead people in the postmortem photographs are young. The families planned on getting a picture taken down the road, but the untimely death of a son or daughter would prompt them to get the photo taken sooner with the deceased able to still be used in the photo.

How dead are they? Do they dig them up out of the grave or once they die do the family members say, "oh hey we never got around to take that family photo..."

crazy creepy

f-ed up.

^^^ I'm surprised it took 13 responses before someone said that...

Styro Folme wrote: i'd hit it.

Creepy, but funny none the less.

It's not uncommon for someone in funerals in rural Puerto Rico to take pictures of the dead in the casket and send them to family members as a memento of the funeral.