Postmortem Photographs: a long standing misconception

For the month of October I've decided to share examples of the terrifying, creepy or downright strange. Today I'll be sharing some information about postmortem photographs, also known as memento mori.

"Sleeping Beauty"
Courtesy of The Thanatos Archive

Postmortem photography was very common in the nineteenth century when death occurred in the home and was quite an ordinary part of life. In Newfoundland the tradition is said to have lasted into the mid-twentieth century. Today, the tradition of taking postmortem photographs has largely ceased, which most likely indicates a cultural shift, reflecting a general discomfort with death. Today these images are often viewed as vulgar or sensational. However, when placed in historical context, these photographs are a loving memorization of dead family members. Many of these photos, especially those of infants and children, were the only images ever taken of the departed, and therefore cherished deeply by grieving family members. 

"The Bride"
Courtesy of The Thanatos Archive

There is, however, one misconception about postmortem images that I would like to clear up, especially after this list of memento mori photographs was posted today on the popular entertainment website, Buzzfeed. This list includes many images of the presumably dead, some of which are standing upright.

Upon seeing many of these "standing copses" I became skeptical and started to do some digging. I got in touch with Jack Mord, owner of the Thanatos Archive near Seattle, Washington, and he happily cleared this up for me. The Thanatos Archive has an extensive collection of original nineteenth and early twentieth century postmortem and memorial photographs, dating as far back at the 1840s.  

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18khyokifify2jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg

Many people argue that the stand pictured above was used to prop up the dead for photographs. According to Mord, "You will never see a dead person simply standing, all by themselves, in the middle of a room supported by a stand. If there is a visible stand base in the photo, it’s guaranteed that they were alive." 

And why is this? Mord goes on to explain that, "those stands, like the one in the diagram, were simply posing stands. They were not made to support people’s weight in any way, and certainly not to hold up dead bodies."

Mord affirms that these stands had lightweight, adjustable arms and prongs on them that lightly touched the person’s body. The purpose of the stand was just to help a living person stay on mark and as still as possible for their portrait. 

There are cases where dead people have been posed standing up, but they are never stood up using common posing stands. As Mord explains, "if rigor mortis had set in, they would sometimes be photographed upright with other people supporting them, sometimes covered by, or behind blankets, or rarely, leaning back against a wall."

So how to do you know a faked "upright postmortem" image of a living person from the real and rare upright images of a corpse with rigor mortis? As Mord  describes, "when you do see these rare upright postmortem photos of people with rigor mortis, there is no doubt whatsoever they are dead – they look like stiff, dead corpses, usually with their eyes closed, not casually posed, healthy people."

"Mr. Colton"
Courtesy of The Thanatos Archive

Thank you to Jack Mord for helping with this post. If you are in the California area and are interested in postmortem photography, over 200 pieces from Mord's collection will be on exhibit at UC Fullerton from November 2 through December 12. 

Oh and if you were wondering about that list on Buzzfeed, according to Mord, numbers "3, 4, 8, 9, 10 and 12, are not postmortem images, and have been floating around for ages."

If you're from Newfoundland and Labrador and have any memento mori you would like to share, please email nicole@heritagefoundation.ca. 

-Nicole  

Finding Local Folklore at Ascension Collegiate, Bay Roberts

The ICH office, and the Bay Robert Cultural Foundation, are starting a project to document folk beliefs, superstitions, charms, and cures in the Bay Roberts area. We'll be doing a series of recorded interviews with locals, and we've also started a project with Level I students in Ms Welsh's English class at Ascension Collegiate.

We visited the school earlier this week, talking about local folklore and supernatural belief. We talked with the students about doing primary research, and going out and asking questions. To help them out, we developed a one-page questionnaire, for them to take home and use while interviewing parents, family members, friends, or neighbours.

We are heading back to Ascension on Friday morning to see what the students collected, and to help them write up some of their folklore findings.

Here are the questions the students are using:

1). Is there a place in your community that people say is haunted? ....a haunted cemetery, a haunted walkway, a haunted cliff or rock, a house, or other building? What are the ghostly stories connected to these places? 

2). When you were growing up, were there any places you were told not to go because the fairies would get you? Where was this and what are the stories you were told? 

3). What are the local stories about shipwrecks? ...buried treasures? What about ghost or weather lights seen on the water?

4). Are there any people who are believed to be witches in the community? Why do people think this? What kind of powers does this person have? 

5). Have you ever had a visit from the Old Hag while you were sleeping? What happened and do you believe that this experience was real or just a dream?

6). Do you know of any special charms, superstitions, cures or remedies that are used in your community?

If you know of a story like this from the Bay Roberts area, you can email lisa@heritagefoundation.ca.

Teachers, librarians or museums: you can download a pdf of these questions right here.

Newfoundland Folklorists in the Prairies

September was a busy month for at least some Newfoundland folklorists. Not only was I fully immersed in the amazing (and intensive) Qudi Vidi Fieldschool for incoming folklore graduate students, but I also traveled to Edmonton to help represent some of the HFNL's work at their annual Alberta Museums Association conference. The theme of this year's conference was Intangible Cultural Heritage and so who better to invite as keynote speaker than Dale Jarvis, ICH Development Officer for the province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In his talk, Dale offered the audience a look at the kinds of ICH work that we're doing here in Newfoundland. We also had two other Newfoundland folklorists in attendance: MA students Claire McDougall and Kristin Catherwood. It was very nice for us to sit back and reflect on everything we have achieved over the past year. It was also great to chat with people from across to country to learn about what kinds of programing is starting up in other provinces.

For my part in the conference, I facilitated a talk on digital storytelling and the different ways that oral historical information can be presented. In this session, I was able to share with participants a series of audio clips that I've collected about particular places, objects, buildings, traditions, and people. To help demonstrate how to begin an oral history interview, I invited Kristin Catherwood to sit and answer some questions about where she is from and why she decided to become a folklorist. Please feel free to listen to an excerpt of this interview where she discusses her love for the prairies and how it connects to her current studies. Given her passion, it's no wonder that she's now studying the vernacular architecture of Saskatchewan's historic farms for her MA thesis.

Follow Kristin's blog The Barn Hunter to find out all about her pursuit of folklore and barns all around the prairie province she calls home. Thanks Kristin, for sharing your story with us.

-Lisa

Tuesday's Folklore Photo: Pumpkins!

[799. Family] Boys Holding Pumpkin
circa 1920-1950
Courtesy of: United Church Archives - H.M. Dawe Photograph Collection

To celebrate the first day of October I focused on pumpkins for this Tuesday's folklore photo. At first I wanted to share an archival image of Newfoundlanders celebrating Halloween, but it seems these are few and far between. When I searched "pumpkins" on Memorial University's Digital Archive and came across these cute little guys, I couldn't resist sharing. These boys are absolutely beside themselves with excitement over this pumpkin!

Interestingly, it was once tradition in Newfoundland to carve turnips for Halloween rather than pumpkins. This is said to be a carry over from Celtic tradition. Pumpkins carved as jack-o-lanterns would not have been part of traditional Halloween festivals in Celtic Europe, since pumpkins are New World plants, but large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows to ward off evil spirits.


If you happen to be growing your own pumpkins, you may find this advice from Ross Traverse helpful. This was originally published in Decks Awash, 1987.

Courtesy of:  Decks Awash, Vol. 16, no.01 (Jan-Feb 1897)

If you have an archival images of Newfoundlander's celebrating Halloween, please email Nicole at nicole@heritagefoundation.ca. We'd love to share them on the blog at the end of the month! :)

A Persian bonfire for a grey Newfoundland day

I'm in Corner Brook for a meeting sponsored by the Qalipu First Nation, and it is a dreary, grey day here on the west coast. I was delighted therefore to open my mailbox and find a note and photo from Shabnam Inanloo Dailoo, the Heritage and Community Engagement Adviser with Western Heritage in St. Albert, Alberta.

A native of Iran, Shabnam was one of the many people I had the pleasure of meeting at the Alberta Museums Association conference last week. She was intrigued by my mention of Bonfire Night traditions in Newfoundland, and asked me if I knew of the end-of-year bonfire traditions in Iran.

Happily, I was! A few years ago, as part of our Festival on Fire, we organized a talk between Dr. Philip Hiscock and Ebrahim Monajemi, comparing bonfire traditions in Newfoundland and Iran. You can listen to that interview on the Intangible Cultural Heritage Inventory for Newfoundland and Labrador.

Shabnam, who has done research on traditional Persian gardens, describes the photo as a "Persian fresco on the walls of Chehel Sotun Garden (40-column garden) from 17th century depicting the bonfire ceremony.... clearly an intangible cultural heritage associated with a cultural place in an artistic way."

An interview with CBC Central!

Yesterday, I was contacted and interviewed by Leigh Anne Power from CBC Central on the wells and springs project I've been working on here at the Heritage Foundation. Have a listen!

http://www.cbc.ca/centralmorning/episodes/2013/09/25/well-researched/

Also, if you have any stories, wells and springs, photos, or memories you would like to share with us, please contact me - I would love to hear more from you!

Contact me here: sarah@heritagefoundation.ca or 1 (709) 739-1892 ext. 7

Sharing stories of Quidi Vidi Village, Sunday, 7pm

This Sunday, graduate students from Memorial University’s Folklore Department will be sharing some of their fieldwork discoveries at a community gathering in Quidi Vidi. For the past three weeks, new folklore graduate students have been stationed in the village, as part of their graduate program requirements.

Students have been learning about a variety of different cultural documentation methods, all from a folkloristic perspective. They have learned how to use recording equipment and conduct oral history interviews, picked up photography tips from Newfoundland photographer Brian Ricks, and had instruction in how to draw floor plans of historic buildings. Along the way, they have interacted with locals, and gained insight into how folklorists really work in communities.

The students’ work is part of the “Folklore 6020: Field and Research Methods” course, aimed at teaching students how to document local culture and traditions, taught by instructor Dr. Gerald Pocius. The fieldschool program is a partnership between the Department of Folklore, the Quidi Vidi Village Foundation, the City of St. John’s, and the Heritage Foundation of NL’s Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) office.

“This is the second time we’ve partnered with Memorial University to run the folklore field school program,” says the foundation’s Dale Jarvis. “It is great for students to see how research happens outside of a classroom setting.”

Students will present their findings and research to the community at 7pm on Sunday, September 29th, at The Quidi Vidi Village Plantation, 10 Maple View Place, in Quidi Vidi. The event is free and open to the public.

(Photo: local resident China Snow being interviewed as part of a 

folklore class at The Plantation, photo by Lisa Wilson.)

Bite what you can chew: Project focus for your oral history or folklore project

I'm back in the office after spending the end of last week at the Alberta Museums Association's annual conference, where the theme this year was on Intangible Cultural Heritage, and I'm already back into the thick of things.

Conferences tend to revitalize me, and get me thinking about what it is we do here at the Heritage Foundation's ICH program. And being asked questions about what other people could do to pursue projects helps get me focussed on practical approaches.

So it was with delight today that I had a phone conversation with Madison Sharman, who I met briefly at the AMA conference (you can check out her art and photography page on facebook).  The organization she works with is embarking on an oral history project, and she had questions about where to start, and what to do with collected materials.

Many of her questions seemed very familiar, and are ones often asked by groups starting out doing some kind of ethnographic documentation project. So I gave her some of my thoughts, starting out with project focus.

I've seen a lot of community projects get bogged down quickly. They all start from a similar place: a sense that stories or traditions are under threat, and that a need to collect information from the community before it vanishes. It is a legitimate fear. One of the big reasons we do documentation work is to collect that sort of information whilst we can.  For that reason, and for other reasons, lots of groups or museums have started oral history collection projects.

But often they go nowhere.

I think one of the big reasons for this is that organizations simply try to collect too much stuff all at once. In haste to collect everything they can, they end up with a morass of audio or video recordings and notes, with no clear focus or thematic similarity. In collecting everything, they've ended up with information that doesn't have a clear purpose, or eventual use. And often, it ends up sitting in a box, under someone's desk, forgotten.

Sometimes, the people they collect from, their informants,  are uncertain what is expected from them. While they have stories and memories to share, some aren't sure where to start with their stories while being interviewed.

Much of this can be solved by having a clear set of goals, and setting a very specific project scope, with targeted questions. Initially, some community groups resist this, in their goal of wanting to collect as much as they can before it vanishes. I always encourage groups to start small, work on a meaningful project, that results in a clear final product that they can share back with the community.

Think about why you want to do the project, and what you hope to end up with when the project is completed. Instead of doing a project on the history of your town, maybe pick one street, or one shop, or one park. Instead of doing a project on women's work in general, look at one particular craft or occupation or tradition bearer. Don't be afraid to start small, or stop when you think the amount of data you have collected is getting too large to process. Once you finish a project, and have something to show for it, you can always do another project! I much prefer seeing a couple small projects finished, than one unwieldy, behemoth of a project that is never ended.

A finished, understandable,  and accessible project means that when you go forward looking to do another project, you can show what you've done. This way, you, your group, future collaborators, partners, informants, and, importantly, funders, know what you are capable of.

Want some tips on things to think about before you start a project? Check out our project planning checklist! Download it, share it with your group, print it off, and make notes on it. You don't need to fill out every block on the checklist, but hopefully it will give you a better sense of the scope of the project you are embarking on, before you end up with a box of recordings stuck under your desk and piles of unfinished paperwork.

Those are my thoughts! Thanks, Maddy!

Got a question about starting a folklore or oral history project for your town? Email me at ich@heritagefoundation.ca or call 1-888-739-1892 ext 2.

- Dale Jarvis

Tuesday's Folklore Photo: This is Mr. TB Germ

Educational booklet published by the Newfoundland Tuberculosis Association.
Ca. 1950 

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, Newfoundland had a very high rate of tuberculosis infection and death, much higher than that of Canada, Great Britain or the United States. Several factors contributed to the spread of  TB in Newfoundland and Labrador. One was the custom of large families spending a lot of time in the kitchen, especially in winter, when all would gather to socialize and stay warm. A person with active TB would then expose their family and visitors to the disease.  A monotonous diet that lacked fresh food and important nutrients also weakened immune systems and left Newfoundlanders vulnerable to the disease. Tuberculosis was also difficult to detect until it became active and at this point was much more difficult to treat. Also, severe isolation in Newfoundland and Labrador meant there was little or no access to medical services and to top it off,  there was little understanding of the causes and prevention of TB. 

Educational booklet published by the Newfoundland Tuberculosis Association.
Ca. 1950 

The Newfoundland Tuberculosis Association, a dedicated anti-TB group founded in 1944 by Ted Meany, released publications to educate the community about the spread and prevention of the disease. The booklet featured in today's folklore photo was published by the association ca. 1950. 

Educational booklet published by the Newfoundland Tuberculosis Association.
Ca. 1950 

Tuberculosis continued to be a leading cause of death in Newfoundland and Labrador well into the 20th century, only being overtaken by heart disease and cancer in the 1950s. From 1901-1975, just under 32,000 people died of TB in Newfoundland. Often the victims were males aged 15 to 45, the wage earners of their families, so the social and economic costs of TB were great. It wasn't until the 1970s, with advances in pharmaceuticals, living conditions and through the efforts of the Newfoundland Tuberculosis Association, that Tuberculosis was defeated.

Click here to read the full booklet! 

-Nicole