In the late 1800s, Edward Bok, the reform-minded editor of Ladies’ Home Journal, launched a crusade against, of all things, the parlour—that pretentious little room, as he saw it, reserved by the Victorians for formal Sunday teas and displaying their dead. Better, he thought, to banish the old-time hats and coats and the corpses in favour of a space for routine family life—call it, he suggested, the living room. The wordplay caught on, part of a trend driven by lengthening life expectancies that made death itself an unmentionable. “In the 19th century, sex was the taboo,” says Stanley Burns, an eye surgeon and medical historian. “In the 20th century, it was death.” Nowhere, oddly enough, was the shift more pronounced than in family photographs.
A hundred years ago, capturing images of dead relatives was de rigueur. Dad’s eyes were glued shut, his mouth closed, his limbs posed in such a manner as to suggest a quick catnap; in one famous example, the deceased sits with a newspaper clasped in his hands as though just nodding off. Widows wore lockets with the dead faces of their husbands, mothers the images of their dead infants—sometimes with open eyes painted in and rose tincture on their cheeks. Yet changing attitudes soon saw post-mortem photography go the way of the parlour.
Now, research suggesting that families benefit from photographs of deceased offspring has brought the practice back. “There’s that pivotal moment, especially after a stillbirth, where mum all of a sudden won’t remember what her baby looked like—and there’s panic,” says Mary MacCormick, head of the Canadian Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths. Memories of the traumatic days surrounding a difficult birth can also exaggerate a baby’s flaws, haunting parents for years. Hospital staff have battled these anxieties by giving families bereavement kits containing locks of hair, hand- or footprints, and Polaroids. Recently, though, so-called infant bereavement photography has become the domain of professionals.
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