Death photography?

IDLEchild

IDLEchild

Well-Known Member
Can anyone help me out. In the movie "the others" there is a book Nicole Kidman finds where pictures of dead are taken and they are made to look like they are sleeping...childern, families, old people etc all posing as any living person would but there eyes are closed. Is that book or photography of such nature real?

I recall seeing a book with a very similar cover of a girl sleeping on a couch and it reminded me of that book from the movie...is such a thing real? I recall reading the name Lewis Carol as the author....

So anyone know anything about this?....any help appreciated, any links...thanks.
 
books I do not know about but I am sure there are some as there are photos of people and dead animals being photoed. Not to mention the snuff videos and the Faces of Death and Traces of Death movies
 
That interested me after watching the movie too. They are real, though not from a "book" as such although the type of death focus is a major trend in 18th/19th century literature. People used to have death photos to remember their loved ones, a sort of commemorative thing taken on death. Its a type of photography which come under a trend called 'memento mori'...

Heres what I found:

Memento mori is a Latin phrase that means "Remember that you must die." It names a genre of artistic creations that vary widely from one another, but which all share the same purpose, which is to remind people of their own mortality....

...The artistic genre of still life was formerly called vanitas, Latin for "vanity", because it was thought appropriate for each such painting to include some kind of symbol of mortality in each picture; these could be obvious ones like skulls, or subtler ones, like a flower losing its petals. After the invention of photography, many people had photographs taken of recently dead family members; given the technical limitations of daguerreotype photography, this was one way to get the portrait subject to sit still.



theres a site on the particular memento mori in american photography of the 19th century here:
http://www.cmp.ucr.edu/terminals/memento_mori/default.html

other sites which may be of interest...

has a few pics:
http://users.chariot.net.au/~rjnoye/Misc/Postmort.htm

interesting encyclopedia article (where I got definition from):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori

hope that helped, I only had a quick look... theres probably heaps more stuff around like it. Its an interesting thing that seems quite odd from our perspective, because we are so removed from the age where death and mortality was a frequent reality, and we are so used to photography and new technology and our culture has been so 'removed' from the reality of death, sanitised if you like, for so long. (Which brings me to another interesting point which I will post another thread on maybe.) But in those days I guess it was quite reasonable to take a photo to 'remember' someone by before they were gone forever, when photography was such a novelty...it was a very special thing to have the opportunity to capture their last (or probably one of few or only) image. (previously, think that only the wealthy could afford to have portraits made...) A photograph was a nice memento...
 
I don't know of any good death photo books... but see if you can find the video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty.
 
Inkara1 said:
I don't know of any good death photo books... but see if you can find the video for "Mary Jane's Last Dance" by Tom Petty.
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I thought he has a dvd out? or if you have Kazaa or something like it you should be able to get it although in all honesty the actor he used was alive and only playing a cadaver.
 
freako104 said:
I thought he has a dvd out? or if you have Kazaa or something like it you should be able to get it although in all honesty the actor he used was alive and only playing a cadaver.
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Kim Bassinger :brow:
 
freako104 said:
I thought he has a dvd out? or if you have Kazaa or something like it you should be able to get it although in all honesty the actor he used was alive and only playing a cadaver.
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Aren't cadaver's dead body PARTS? Would a whole person also be a cadaver??
 
In spanish it refers to the body of a dead person. (a Latin word perhaps)
 
In swedish(kadaver) too. Kinda like 'corpse', except it's mostly used when talking about animals.
 
tonksy said:
yes. in fact, i have never heard parts referred to as a cadaver.
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Yeah, cadavers are also body parts...my roommate from last year is in a program to become a x-ray technician...she had a book with pics of cadavers and they were all body parts and next summer when she's back in the class room(doing placement now) she gets to x-ray cadavers and they're just parts...not whole bodies...
 
IDLEchild said:
I recall seeing a book with a very similar cover of a girl sleeping on a couch and it reminded me of that book from the movie...is such a thing real? I recall reading the name Lewis Carol as the author....
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Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland.
he loved photography, and his favorite subjects were young girls.
in all i've read and researched about lewis carroll, i have never heard that he photographed dead girls, so i'll suppose that what you saw was just a girl sleeping (or posing like she was sleeping) on a couch. i think i actually know which photo you're speaking of.
 
also, i know that during the time of the american civil war, like, at least that era, when infant mortality was very high, sometimes pictures were taken of the infant to look like it was just sleeping peacefully.
i saw some photos in the personal collection of a woman who was a civil war reinactor and antiques collector, and she had quite a number of such photos.
 
Oh, I figured the dead body in the video was played by either a live actor or a realistic mannequin. If it really was a dead body, then... well, icky poo.
 
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