This vocation of bereavement photography is hardly a new one. From the earliest days of photography you will find pictures of dead people staring at the camera, sometimes with the surgeon’s or embalmer’s stitches all too visible around the scalp or chest. The adults are in their best clothing, sometimes slouched in a chair, sometimes propped up in bed, a Bible underneath one hand. Sometimes the women are holding flowers.
Many, of course, appear to be sleeping, caught by the sneaky photographer as they nap the afternoon away. Others look terrified: eyes wide and impossibly white, the enlarged dots of their pupils fixing you in a mean, unforgiving gaze.
These gazes are artificial, of course: the eyes painted onto the closed, dead lids. They look, I think, like stills from some badly animated cartoon.
In those days portraiture was quite a bit more formal, and sittings a special occasion. Few families owned cameras of their own, and you might have only two or three photographs taken of yourself over the course of a lifetime. Sometimes a grieving relative’s only chance for a photographic record of a beloved’s life was after the beloved was dead.
This was particularly true in the case of children. Infant mortality in the days of our great-grandparents was so high that without the photographic proof people might not ever know you’d ever been a parent. You dressed them up as angels and paid the man good money to take their everlasting portraits, money you doubtless could not spare. You put those portraits up on the mantel or in an honored place on the parlor wall, and you showed them to friends and neighbors, even salesmen come to call. And you alternately preened and choked with grief when they commented “How precious,” “How handsome,” and “How terribly, terribly sad.”
The issue returned with the Wilson child.
Did I mention before that most of the children I photographed were stillborns? Of course that would make sense as there would be no opportunities for school pictures or family portraits or any of the other usual domestic photo opportunities. The need for my services was greater.
But occasionally an older child of one or two years would be signed up for the service, accompanied by parents who were always a bit ashamed for not having engaged in that normal parental obsession of incessant snapshots and home movies.
I have to say I was glad this particular age group didn’t come up too often. It was awful enough to take pictures of parents devastated by the loss of a dream — a child who might have been anything, whose likes and dislikes, the sound of the voice, were completely unknown. Worse was the child who had developed a personality, however roughly formed, who liked toy trucks and hated green beans, who smelled of a dozen different things, whose eyes had focus.
The Wilsons were older than the usual couples I saw. She was in her early forties; he had to be on the far side of fifty. They had a small chicken farm twenty miles outside the city. Mrs Wilson smelled of flour and of make-up carelessly and too thickly applied. In fact I think make-up was a rare accessory for her. She had pupils like little dark peas, washed up in a cup of milk. There was something wrong with her hip; she shuffled and bobbed across the room to the metal chair I’d set up for her. The nice chair was being cleaned, and the appointment had been hastily arranged. I felt bad about that. I knew nothing about her, but I would have liked to have photographed her in the finest hotel in the city.
This reaction was all silliness on my part, of course. She wouldn’t have cared — she was barely aware of her surroundings. Her eyes were focused on another piece of furniture in the room: a gurney bearing a small swaddled bundle, an elderly nurse stationed nearby as if to prevent its theft or escape.
Mr Wilson also came to me in layers. Floating above it all was the stink of chickens, of years of too much labor with too little reward. Under that was a face like sheared-off slabs of rock, and eyes scorched from too little crying, no matter what. Unlike Mrs Wilson, there appeared to be nothing wrong with his body, but he shuffled across the floor just the same, a rising tide of anger impeding forward progress. He stopped dutifully by the rigid metal chair, gripping the back with narrow, grease-stained fingers, a little too tightly because he thought no one would notice. He watched as his wife made her way painfully over to the gurney and stood there patting and stroking — not the sunken little bundle, but the sheets surrounding it.
He didn’t move another step. He knew his place.
The nurse asked if they’d like to “get situated”, and then she’d bring them their son. I couldn’t imagine what she meant — it sounded as if they were moving into a new place, or starting a new job. They appeared to understand her better, however. Mrs Wilson dropped into the chair and held on to her knees. Mr Wilson straightened up as if to verify the height listed on his driver’s license.
The nurse carried the package over, whispering comforting things into its open top. She unwrapped the child and fussed with him in mock-complaint, trying to position him in his mother’s lap so that the large dent in the side of his head wouldn’t show. She almost managed it by laying the dent against his mother’s chest and twisting his pelvis a little. She pretended not to notice the mother’s profound shudder.
Then the nurse quickly backed away from the house of cards she’d just constructed, holding her breath as if even that might trigger collapse. She retreated to the back of the room, with a gesture toward the family as if presenting some magic trick or religious tableau.
The couple stared straight ahead, slightly above me at the dark wall behind. I didn’t bother telling them to look at or reposition the child. They were done with me and what I represented.
All that was left for me to do was to gaze at the child and snap the shutter.
Even slumped inwards like that, he was actually a pretty sturdy kid. Broad-faced with chubby arms and legs. The head a little large, and I wondered briefly if there had been a spreading due to impact and I shook slightly, a bit disgusted with myself. This couple’s beautiful little boy.
But the head wasn’t quite right, and the composition was made worse by the couple’s hunched-forward, intense stares. I moved the camera and tripod a little to the left while gazing through the viewfinder, ready to stop moving when things looked right.
The little boy opened his eyes, the pupils following me.
I looked up from the viewfinder. The eyes remained closed.
Back with my eye to the lens and the boy’s eyes were following me again, as I moved further left, than back right again. It was probably just the position of his head and the slump of the shoulders, but he looked angry. He looked furious.
Finally I stopped. The eyes closed. But as I started to press the button they opened again. Bore down on me. Impatient, waiting.
I took shot after shot that afternoon. Most of them were unusable. What was he so angry about? It was as if he didn’t want his picture taken with these people and he was blaming me for it.
After that day the children opened their eyes for me now and then, although certainly not during the majority of these sessions. I don’t believe I’d still be doing this work today if it had happened with every child. Most of the time my volunteer work consisted of calming the parents without actually counseling them — I don’t have the temperament or training for it. Positioning them, feeling out what they would be comfortable with, and finally taking the shot. That’s what it’s all about, really: taking the shot.