La fotografía de difuntos del siglo XIX como reflejo psicosocial e intelectual de una época

Abstract

The photography of the deceased, especially those taken during their years of public splendor, became a highly demanded product, not only for its emotional value as a reminder of the deceased, or as an aid to the psychological transition of mourning for close relatives, but also for its value as a sociocultural artifice. The post-mortem photography has been subject of profuse sociological, anthropological, artistic and even semiological studies, as a symbolic manifestation, but neither its value nor its meaning end there. Neither, by the way, were the familiar dead the only ones to be immortalized photographically, although they are the ones that have aroused the most interest and imagination in the present. After the nineteenth-century images of corpses, although their heyday continued until the 1920s, the long and controversial relationship that human beings have traditionally maintained with death and the "afterlife" survives. It is not surprising, in this sense, that the stellar moment of this photographic practice coincided temporarily with the birth of spiritualism. Nor that it crossed in time with the mentality and aesthetics of Romanticism, a cultural moment that maintained a peculiar connection to all intents and purposes with death, the dead, the new sociopolitical concepts when managing funeral practices, or the birth of the contemporary Thanatology. The 19th century, especially its second half, was an intellectual and cultural crossroads in which many ideas and approaches to death coming from the past had to merge with the rise of scientific positivism and an entirely new conception of human nature. This work tries to explore, through the photography of the deceased, this historical changes.