Preserving Death on Film, 19th-Century Style

Over at This Day in Tech at the main Wired News site, Tony Long notes that today is the anniversary of the daguerreotype, an early photographic process. It dominated photography in its early years.

In the U.S., the daguerreotype came to be associated with death. Many photographs from that time show a dead person, often a child:

There are photographs of dead children, dead adults, of parentsholding their dead children, and of groups of somber mourners gathered around coffins.... Why did parents, children, and spouses, grieving the dead, spend themoney and take the time to have a daguerreotype made of the departed? The answer lies both inconventions and views of the daguerreotype and in the mid-nineteenth century conventions ofdeath and its representation.

Most simply, the death portrait, especially a picture of a dead child alone, was amemorial. If the daguerreotype served as an accurate portrait of the soul, of a person's essence,
it was doubly effective, with its accuracy and haunting depth, as a way of keeping the memory ofa dead child fresh, of bringing a dead child back to life.

The photos can be a little creepy, but the one shown here is something much more transcendent -- tender and loving.

The mourning portrait [American Daguerreotypes]