A Semblance of Life: the Art of Post-Mortem Photography, now on at the Hennepin Historical Museum, is your chance to gaze at death. In these photos you will see portraits and poses, caressing and cradling, people laying down or sitting. In other words, you’ll recognize the common body language of everyday family photography. But all the while you have to keep reminding yourself that the common denominator of all these photos is death. These are post-mortem photographs. Due to the prohibitive costs of photography in the late 19th-early 20th century, photographs were reserved for only special occasions. In this case, the photos in this exhibit taken shortly after (and sometimes before) relatives passed away from disease or old age.

There is a special attention paid to the dead body but there is something else happening here. In addition to indexing the death that is located in each of these photos, this exhibit avoids simply fulfilling a morbid fascination with death by providing a backward glance to a time when death, while no less traumatic to surviving relatives, was more immanent than we are used to today. Grief and mourning are written all over the surface of these photos and I’ve tried to read through the tears of the relatives that these mothers, children (so many children), and brothers left behind. But other times, I’m left without anything to say; in a fascinating reversal of the Pietà, one photo shows a baby sitting with her dead mother. The baby stares directly into the camera but her mother’s eyelids and lips are tautly shut, her hands closed into limp fists.

After spending some time with these photos, a few questions come to mind: do these images represent how the dead would want to be remembered to the living or, are they how the dead are remembered by the living? Taking in to account the obvious staging of the photos, are we looking at physical reminders of past lives, or are they a certain kind of memorial, a memorial that is somehow un-monumental? Death leaves a physical absence in the family and these photos, in addition to being fascinating historical documents, also evidence a curious anxiety to preserve a relative’s likeness at the last moment it is possible. As quickly as dead bodies are removed from their homes, buried in the ground, and left to decay, so too will the memories of them eventually fail to close the distance between then and now.

Over time, the post-mortem format evolved and the dead are almost lost amidst larger groups of relatives and boughs of flowers. It becomes clear that the photos are less attentive to the mourning of the recently deceased and more about preserving the broken family unit and overcoming the failures of memory. Fast forward to the present: think how easy it is for us to create family photos albums, how different we would remember relatives if it weren’t possible to create visual archives until someone had died, until they were gone forever.