Mike ZohnĪccording to the website Viralnova, they also had posable corpse arms. So they had posing stands.” A Victorian posing stand. But an exposure of even one second is long enough to allow for blurring. “When people talk about long exposure, it sounds like people had to wait for half an hour,” Zohn says. By the 1850s, they were three to eight seconds. By 1839, when the daguerreotype was invented, the longest exposures were a minute and a half. Initially, he explains, exposure time could be half an hour or an hour-but this was for landscapes, never for portraiture. “ is a deceiving term,” says Mike Zohn, a longtime photographer and the owner of Obscura Antiques in New York. Posing stands were used to help living models hold still for that era’s longer exposures, though even that is misleading.

In truth, the propped-up people in Victorian “postmortems” look alive for a much simpler reason: They are. A photographer appears to photograph himself, with a large-view camera and an adjustable head clamp apparatus. Though unfortunate, it’s also understandable: There’s clearly something compelling about a lurid, not-so-distant culture engaging with death in a way we don’t. They fill online galleries of Victorian oddities and accumulate on Pinterest and Instagram-even otherwise reputable websites have contributed to the myths. Or so the story goes.įake postmortem photos, whether categorized in error or intentionally mislabeled to sell for profit, have in recent years become widespread on the Internet. These stands helped corpses look alive, and allowed them to be posed with their still-breathing family members. Because Victorians died young, died quickly, and died of injuries and infections modern medicine helped abolish, they invented elaborate grieving rituals to give meaning to their loved ones’ ephemeral lives.Īll of this happening at the same time as advances in photography led to the prevalence of postmortem photos, where Victorians would haul out their dead, prop them up on stands, and take a picture worth a thousand words. Victorian England had a unique relationship with death.

Victorian portraits