"Sleeping beauty"
When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten.
When this you see remember me Lest I should be forgotten.”
This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.
Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)
All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)
As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)
Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…
But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 - in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.
Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.
Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2
In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…
Dr Marcus Bunyan
‘Remember Me. Postmortems from the M. G. Jacob Collection’ and
‘Through Light. The First 20 Years of Photography in the Photo Library Collections’ at Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, Italy
24th April – 5th July, 2025
SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://wp.me/pn2J2-v6N
1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980
2/ Marcus Bunyan. "This is not my favourite photograph," part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025
Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Main image:
Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping girl
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector
