The Reasoning Behind Mourning Photos

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I was in St. Augustine a few weeks ago, shopping antique stores for old photographs.  As a photographer I love the beauty in vintage photos.  While scrummaging through the piles, I came across a unique photo, something you just don’t find a lot of.  It was a mourning photo, and it had an inscription written on the back that read “Floral tribute to Frank Prine, who died Tuesday, April 26, 1898 at the early age of 6 yrs. 4 mos.”

I immediately purchased this picture, despite its morbid content.  I purchased it because of how rare they are first of all, and second because it meant a lot to some family back then.  Even though mourning photography is morbid to us now, the reasoning is quite mis-understood, but I find it beautiful in its own right.

Back in the early 1800’s when photos first came around with Ambrose Type and Tin Type photographs, this specialty cost people a fortune to have done.  In those days, it was not uncommon for a person to pay up to $25.00.  With inflation, that could run you around $2500.00 today.  Life expectancy was not great back then, if we lived to 50 we were considered old men and women.

If you notice, when you look at photos back then there were not many of kids.  In fact most of the photographs you see were of adults.  This was because it required standing very still. They used posers to keep you still since they did not use flash. It was a timed exposure, so should you move at all, the photo would be blurry and ruin the picture.  Also, children simply did not grasp how expensive the process was, so it would be a waste of money to attempt to have one made of them till they got older and understood the importance of sitting still.  Most of the time when you see a child’s photo from the early 1800’s to early 1920’s they tend to be sleeping.  I hate to break it to you, but those children are “forever” sleeping because they are deceased.

The parents always expected to one day get a photo of them when they were older. Sometimes that did not happen, because they died at a young age. The parents would decide to take a photo of them anyway, and either take a photo of the child looking like they were asleep, or would take a photo of them in their coffins.  Parents would rush to get a photo taken, because this would be the child’s only photo, despite the fact they were dead; it was better than nothing at all.

Parents would not only take photos because it would be the child’s only picture, they also did it to help them mourn the loss of their beloved child.  Sometimes they took photos of deceased adults too, who more than likely had photos of them while alive. This was a common way to help mourn the loss of a loved one.

I know about this because it happened to my great aunt Emma.  In 1920, she broke her arm and died from blood poisoning.  Our family had two known photos of her, a small 2×4 that contained her, my aunt Adela and my uncle Wally.  The other was one of her by herself when she was maybe 7 or 8, and the last one was her in her coffin.  My aunt Adela, told me that it helped her parents mourn the loss, and since she was only 10, they didn’t have many photos of her, so the coffin photo was at least one more picture of their sweet Emma.

Today, we take for granted that our loved ones live long lives, that children or infant deaths are not as common today as they were back then, and that most of us have cameras so we take loads of photos of our children and family members.  We forget that this was not the case back in the early days in America and that it was quite expensive.  So before you decide this is all just morbid, think through why they did it and how they didn’t have the conveniences we have today; the luxury of our own personal cameras and how inexpensive they are, and you will see that mourning photography really isn’t as morbid as it first appears.