Photographing the dead in their coffins (No I didn’t put such a picture in my post)

[catseye360]

Anybody ever take a picture of a deceased person lying in their coffin? One of my two grandmas used to do this regularly. I never did see her actually taking the pictures, but I did see several of the pictures she had taken. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she lived to 102 years of age and outlived most other human beings.

The reason for this post is that we recently attended a funeral of a friend of ours. He was 79 years old, and one of his loved ones was unable to make it to his funeral (long soap-opera story I’m not going into). She asked my wife to please take a picture of the man in his coffin and send it to her.

Now, me, I’ve never taken a picture of a dead person in their coffin. I've taken a lot of pictures in my lifetime, but never of dead people. And neither has my wife. I think it’s creepy!

At the visitation before the funeral, my wife mentioned the request to a friend of ours, who appeared open to the idea but recognizing how morbid the idea might sound. We didn’t ask this friend, a widow, if she had taken a picture of her late husband lying in his coffin.

So, she and my wife went up to the coffin, their bodies together concealing the fact that my wife was taking a picture of the deceased, fulfilling the request. Using her iPhone, the picture was unintentionally and most ironically made in “Live” mode.

I had to save the pictures on the desktop computer and then put them back on my wife’s iPhone, not in “live” mode. She picked one and texted it to our friend, who by now is living out of state.

And no, I am definitely NOT going to post the picture in the “Random Daily Photos” thread. For ANY month. You're welcome. I think it’s rather creepy to take a picture of a dead body.

What do YOU think of photographing the dead in their coffins?

Testing the theory of "take a picture, it will last longer."

 

[pixeljammer]

Anybody ever take a picture of a deceased person lying in their coffin? One of my two grandmas used to do this regularly. I never did see her actually taking the pictures, but I did see several of the pictures she had taken. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she lived to 102 years of age and outlived most other human beings.


What do YOU think of photographing the dead in their coffins?

Pictures of Death

When photography was new, it was often used to preserve corpses via their images.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[pixeljammer]

I don't see anything wrong with it if the other people around are not bothered. And if it's just you, the camera, and the corpse, what possible difference could it make?

 

[pixeljammer]

Laser scanner FTW!

On another note, why settle for a photo when you can cast a plaster death mask, right there! Nowadays you could 3D print one for all your relatives.

 

[pixeljammer]

ignore

 

[pixeljammer]

At this point, I'm surprised people haven't started taking "selfies" with the deceased in the casket.

casket selfies are a thing

 

[bowman]

I don’t find it normal or weird. Dead is dead. But I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in coffins, and not one of them looked more than superficially like the live person. I’d much rather have a photo of the person alive, in their prime. That’s the person we knew.

 

[dspellman1]

On another note, why settle for a photo when you can cast a plaster death mask, right there! Nowadays you could 3D print one for all your relatives.

Again, apropos of nothing...

I was at the new Academy Museum in LA. There are plaster castings of the faces of people like Clark Gable, Grace Kelly, etc., that were taken to allow makeup artists to make prosthetics, etc. I was fascinated -- Grace Kelly was just...gorgeous. You can see every pore and scar on the guys.

This is nothing new -- Madame Tussaud bribed people (or snuck in) to let her do death masks of all kinds of people, including those who'd just had their heads chopped off by the guillotine during the French Revolution. They still exist, and if you want to know exactly what Marie Antoinette looked like in her last seconds, that's where you go. Not to the portraits done by painters of the time. Her string of wax museums originated from her enterprise.

When Rick Baker was doing the special effects makeup for Thriller, they did a cast of Michael Jackson's face and hands. One of the shop assistants walked by and glanced down at the upturned cast and commented, "My, that boy do wear a lot of makeup!" The interior of the original stuff was all brown. My friend (who was working for Rick at the time) still has a pair of the plaster hands on his fireplace mantel. Somebody somewhere has photographs of the whole process, including of Michael covered in goop with straws coming out of his nostrils.

And then, of course, there was the famous Cynthia Plaster Caster (Albritton) who, sadly, died in April of last year. Her most famous casting is probably one of her first, of Jimi Hendrix, who got his pubes caught in the alginate she was using, and she had to pluck them out, one by one, while he waited. For a while, she was doing regular exhibitions of something like 68 different castings.

One final one: Val Kilmer played Jim Morrison in The Doors movie. I had to meet him at the location in Marina del Rey where they were doing a full-length laser scan of him for a scene where Morrison gives his girlfriend (Pamela Courson played by Meg Ryan) a doll/replica of himself. While he was waiting for the process, I had to do photos of him under an overhanging light in a hallway, and those were later used in publicity and in the movie itself. He was nice enough to me, but a PIA to everyone else.

 

[dspellman1]

At this point, I'm surprised people haven't started taking "selfies" with the deceased in the casket.

They have.

 

[dspellman1]

I've already made plans to have my ashes put into a pepper shaker.

But I'm not telling you which one.