In 2001, a sequence of a shocking movie like ‘The Others’ it forced us as spectators to give a start and then we found out about a practice almost unknown today but very popular in the 19th century. Nicole Kidman finds a album of old photographs and to her surprise because all the portrayed there seem to be asleep, she asks her housekeeper. That this? “They are not asleep, they are dead,” they reply. “They were made in the hope that their souls would live on through their portraits.” The film takes place in 1945, after the carnage of World War II, when the custom was already a relic of the past and it is natural that Kidman’s character and us, of course, are repelled by these images, but at the same time they awaken a certain fascination, not exempt from an unhealthy aroma. Today a novel like the recent ‘Anoxia’ (Anagram) by the Murcian writer Miguel Ángel Hernández that has that matter at the center of its plot and the collection of more than 150 post-mortem photographs that the actor and singer Carlos Areces has treasured for 20 yearsbring this matter back to a 21st century in which we have radically expelled death from our daily lives.
For both Hernández and Areces, Amenábar’s film was the zero kilometer of a growing personal interest. Also a humorist and cartoonist, he was already an inveterate collector of old photography, especially those related to family rituals such as communions, when he came across these types of images that he learned to value by placing them in that domestic environment. “Today it is very rare for someone to want to keep an image of the corpse of a loved one, so it is necessary to place this practice in context. Putting yourself in the shoes of someone whose son has died and does not have a single photo to remind him of, because then photography was an expensive item. They are photos made from absolute love”, Areces qualifies while recalling how much access to photography has changed when today in a single day and through our mobiles we are capable of generating the same number of photographs as in the entire 19th century.
The end is to perpetuate
In times when the sexiest photographic object for almost everyone is a plate of food that we will forget a second after having captured it, it is difficult to imagine something more opposite to what post-mortem photography represented in its day. “Our digital photos -says Miguel Ángel Hernández, who in addition to being a novelist is an art historian- simply indicate what we are doing at a given moment, they show what we see without the desire to transcend and are related to the interest in sharing fleeting moments that will disappear. in the networks The purpose of post-mortem photographs is to perpetuatealthough finally with the passage of time they have ended up becoming one more curiosity for us”.
These necrophilous images, made in photographic studios first as single copy daguerreotypes and later from negatives, which today can be disturbing to us, say a lot about how those who commissioned them faced death. The famous phases of grief established by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross – and satirized in the film ‘All the Jazz‘- can also be detected in the photographic field and are framed in turn in various historical trends. In a first phase of denial, which coincides with the beginnings of photography, the deceased is shown as if he were alive, with open eyes, which were sometimes painted by hand, sitting in his favorite chair and sometimes surrounded by his relatives. Later, the negotiation phase places the deceased in bed as sleepers, a very common practice with children, given the high infant mortality that existed at the time; they were the famous and usual ‘little angels’. Finally, once the death has been assumed, at the end of the 19th century the loved one is usually portray more conventionally in the coffin surrounded by wreaths. “Naturally, the most sinister photos are those that represent the deceased as alive,” Hernández points out, “it was a crazy practice because when rigor-mortis occurred, which involves the hardening of the corpse, sometimes they broke the bones of the legs or arms to place it in a certain position. position and opened their eyes with teaspoons.
intimacy prescribes
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Today, in the 21st century, something similar can be found in Puerto Rico, where a funeral home offers the possibility of themed wakes, that the corpse can be veiled, for example, with daily clothes or in a tracksuit on the back of the motorcycle that he enjoyed in life or dressed in the housecoat sitting in his rocking chair. This is a rare offer, unusual in the country, but in a certain way it is linked to the intense cultural relationship that some Latin American countries, especially Mexico, maintain with death. “Everything is a question of perspectives and sensitivities different from ours,” Areces points out, convinced that intimacy prescribes over the years. “Today we can contemplate the porn films that Alfonso XIII ordered to be shot for his personal consumption. They are pieces that have an incalculable value because they specify the way of understanding the life of our ancestors”.
The actor recalls the controversial case of one of the greatest experts in post-mortem photography, el doctor Stanley B. Burns, who in 1977 began to create his prestigious private collection of medical photography that today houses one of the most important collections of images of the dead -in fact, the photos for the Amenábar film came from there-: “In one of the books that Burns edited from the series ‘Sleeping Beauty’ he appears next to his father’s corpse. For him it was an act of respect. After having used so many photos of unknown people and having opened the door to the privacy of so many people, even though there are no longer relatives who could feel hurt, it seemed coherent to him and a poetic way to return the favor by showing an image of his own privacy”.
