Death came quickly in the nineteenth century. Some diseases could wipe out all of one’s children within a day. Adults, too, were susceptible. Cholera epidemics, for example, were swift, savage killers. Curiously, however, except for children who died from dehydration or from viruses that left conspicuous skin rashes, or adults who succumbed to cancer or extreme old age, the dead would often appear to be quite healthy.
Ironically, because of modern methods for sustaining life, contemporary corpses don’t look nearly as robust as the remains of their ancestors. Today, we bring people back from death with defibrillators and other technological marvels. We keep patients alive until they waste away or until we shut off the monitors and pull the tubes. As a general result, when people die today, they really look dead: shrunken, dehydrated, debilitated.
We enlist specialists to beautify the body, but as a society, we no longer live with personal death and dying as part of our everyday lives. Dealing with death has been left to the professionals, from physicians to hospice caretakers to morticians. Our control of killer epidemics and our ability to treat disease makes us unaccustomed to living with and seeing death close up – until the spread of AIDS and, with it, the spectacle of young people deteriorating and dying right in front of their families.
When someone dies today, the first thing we do – whether in a hospital, mortuary or movie – is close the eyes. In contemporary photographs of the dead, the dead do not stare back. Because of this convention, we sometimes fail to realize that nineteenth-century postmortem photographs depict the dead. In the past, families could request that a subject’s eyes be open or closed. In postmortem photographs of many children who were never photographed while they were alive, the eyes were left open to provide a semblance of life. This melancholy ruse was sometimes embellished by a tableau that made the child appear to either be engaged in some activity, or consciously posing. In other cases, two photographs would be taken: one with eyes open, one with eyes closed.
Postmortem photographs, taken mainly for middle and working class families, were an unquestioned aspect of everyday life. They were accompanied by no written explanations. They were taken with the same lack of self-consciousness with which today’s photographer might document a party or a prom.
That’s why the Whittaker ad is so unusual – and so important.
In many historical studies there often appears an extraordinary artifact, a Rosetta Stone, that offers future historians a contemporary account and understanding. The Rosetta Stone of my investigation came from the Catskill Mountain town of Liberty, N.Y. There, 140 years ago, photographer R. B. Whittaker prepared an advertising card that declared his aims and offered his options for childhood postmortem photographs. Headlined “Fast Asleep or Wide Awake,” the ad shows two Whittaker photographs of the same dead child, one with eyes open, one with eyes closed. Now, almost a century and a half later, the photographs give us a better understanding of the options then available. Many written accounts of how to photograph the dead, with eyes open or closed, were published in professional photographic journals, but Mr. Whittaker’s advertisement was one of the few to share the subject with the general public. He took pride in his ability to portray dead children in whatever state their parents preferred, “fast asleep or wide awake.”
In most postmortem photographs of adults, the eyes are closed, mute testimony to the family’s acceptance of death. Other photographs, though, in which the eyes remain open, can seem even sadder because they attempt to keep death at bay, to deny the undeniable. They reveal heartbreaking pain as families fight to keep the dead alive with one final image.
