photos of the dead

[pdust]

i watched a film last night and an old man had framed photos of relatives who had passed away on his sideboard...... the film was modern but the photos were old ones.... ive seen it before and i think it was popular round victorian times (though i may be wrong)

i find it really freaky.... especially when they put the person in their erm natural habitat so to speak.... i cant imagine anything worse than having a photo of my mam/nans/grandads etc taken after they were dead. I can just about understand having photos of babies, i know photography wasnt as simple as it is these days and if babies were stillborn or passed away just after birth then i kind of understand that but not the other people

would you feel comfortable having photos of dead relatives? why on earth did they do it? was it just a fashionable thing?

[jno]

not of boredom, I hope

[jno]

hang on, I'm getting off topic, it's against the law. Sorry, pixi.

Slightly more helpfully: people getting family portraits painted in olden times would sometimes have dead ones painted in too, especially infants, for the sake of completeness. Some of this attitude may have continued into the days of photography.

Note the warning on the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7B3x0fW6xM

[pdust]

*nobody's ever passed away on my sideboard. *

lol jno ;)

*Wasn't this one of the threads in the movie 'the Others'? *

ive seen the others and seen pics there too but not seen a thread about it mosaic... the film i watched last night was Survivors of the Dead....

I can just about understand taking pics of funerals woof but its not something i would do i dont think......

its seems from what ive read so far to be a common worldwide thing, and ive had my memory jogged cos i remember reading something years ago about people doing it in other places (lol cant remember the names but its where voodoo used be or maybe still is common) not that im associating the pics with that

*When we as the human race can accept that there is nothing taboo/ scary/ un natural about death then it is not weird at all. *

i dont find death itself scary or unnatural (obviously lol) but its just pics.... i would hate to have a pic of someone i loved when they had passed away and everytime i looked at it thinking omg they were dead then..... much nicer imo opinion to either have photos of them alive or not at all...

lol at ron

[pdust]

*A few have died in my bed *

*not of boredom, I hope *

lol with lots of o's

tut jno you know me, i dont care if it goes off topic at all.... im just off for 10 mins but will watch vid when im back...

[pdust]

just looked at the vid... i saw quite a few of the photos when i searched about it earlier... some of them are so sad, mainly the pics of babies and kids but i still find some of them quite freaky....

i know they kept them in special albums but i keep thinking like when you show pics to the kids or grandkids.... heres your nana at the seaside, heres your grandad at the allotment, heres your uncle stan sat at the table ...dead....

[gina32]

smiling crow i couldnt agree more, they are no different to them being alive but have their eyes closed. i have pictures of my dad on my phone of him in his coffin and look at them many a time.

[joko]

i dont mind looking at the pictures - it is interesting... but not if they were close to me... i'd hate to see them like that... i just know id end up with that image every time i thought of them... rather than ones of them happy and alive.

[chaptazbru]

No, I wouldn't want pics of dead relatives, I prefer looking at them when they were alive. Ratter's post really, really moved me.

[firewatch]

yes it was in the film the others it was a key turning point in the movie.

I dont find them to freaky, i think its just an old custom to remember people by who died. The babies are quite sad you can see the pain in the parents faces.

[pastafreak]

There was a whole culture of death during victorian times. Not just photographing the dead-remember that photography was quite new. But also the wearing of jewellery with strands of hair of the dead.
I have an old copy of a book published in the 60's called "Wisconsin Death Trip"..where the author took death notices and newspaper accounts of how people died,along with photos of the deceased,and compiled a kind of 'story' about life in an isolated mid-west town in the 1880's..it's quite creepy.

http://www.amazon.co....el-Lesy/dp/0826321933