Mourning is a strange thing, and different cultures deal with it in vastly different ways. But there’s a reason people associate the Victorians above all with morbidity and death, and one of them is memento mori like this:
The fact is, postmortem photographs like this were taken more than any other kind of photograph in the Victorian era — especially in the U.S. — and in many cases these carefully-arranged, meticulously staged pictures were the only ones ever taken of their subjects. From Stanley Burns’ book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America:
