Tibs 2008There isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t require me to scroll through digital images of our photograph collection stored in the museum’s database.  I am usually doing research for someone who has called to inquire if we have a picture of a particular person or building.  Sometimes I am looking for an image that a staff member or volunteer has asked me to find for them.  It never fails that my search will lead me off on a rabbit trail sparked by an image I see while doing the research.

Before I go on, I need to give a bit of back story:   I had seen a collection of images (perhaps it was online or perhaps it was on the History Channel – I don’t remember now) of portraits taken in the 1800’s of dead people.  The portraits were very eerie looking since many of the portraits were staged to look like the person was still living and was posing for the portrait.  Some of the dead people were posed with a sibling or parents.  Telltale signs of portraits of dead people were stands behind the people used to prop them up, listless and vacant stars, and discoloration of hands. Today, it seems like a macabre thing to do, but in that period, it was a common practice like creating memorial jewelry or a memorial wreath from human hair from a deceased loved one.

The other day, as I scrolled through photos in our collection for a project, I came to a particular part of our collection of digital images created from our glass plate negatives, tin types, daguerreotypes, and lantern slides.  Almost all of these images are portraits of people taken in the middle to late 1800’s.  One of the portraits reminded me of those I had seen of dead people.  It was the portrait of a young girl who looked as though she was being propped up with a pole at her left elbow.

Did we have portraits of dead people in our collection like those I had learned about earlier?!  I had to look through them all to find out!  I thought maybe we would have one or two, if any.  However, after a long period of peering at those faces from so long ago, I started seeing “dead” people in lots of them!  Was that possible?

The person who could tell me with a certainty was the photographer who had volunteered his time a few winters back to digitize all of those images for the Historical Society, Rick Gallup of Gallup’s Fine Art in Kirtland.  I e-mail Rick about my seeing “dead” people, attaching copies of the images of the suspicious looking portraits to the e-mail.

Rick quickly e-mailed me back the next day thanking me for “starting his day with a smile.”  He assured me that though “they are all dead now” they weren’t when they had their portraits taken.  Rick explained that the photography process was a slow one back then, and young people might have trouble standing still or sitting up straight, so stands were placed behind them or beside them to remind them to be still and straight.

Of course!  That made sense.  I stopped seeing “dead” people in the portraits and started seeing “real” ones; children and adults who were possibly not the best at getting their portraits taken.  Unfortunately, sometimes the long process had the ill effect of making them appear like they were dead.

By: Lynn Vandevort, Collections Manager Lake County Historical Society