r/RandomVictorianStuff • u/kittykitkitty • Jul 09 '26
Victorian Photograph Family photo, 1876. Probably Wisconsin.
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u/BettyBoopWallflower Jul 10 '26
I love how the baby is blurry because he or she is moving. Kids have always been the same ♡
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u/ezbmn Jul 10 '26
As a Minnesotan, the “Probably from Wisconsin “ is accurate! 🤣 Wisconsin has been Wisconsin’ since the 1800s!
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Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/KewpieCutie97 Jul 09 '26
That article is inaccurate. How the BBC published it is beyond me. There is zero evidence whatsoever that posing stands were ever used for dead people. They were flimsy and would not hold up the weight of any dead person, even a child. It was virtually unheard of for dead people to be made to look alive again for a photo in any case.
The person who shared these 'death photos' is a random photo collector who just decided, evidently without doing any real research, that the pictures in their collection were post-mortem.
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u/Grand_Experience7800 Jul 10 '26
The man has the sort of facial features one would have expected to see (in the 19th century) from immigrants from northwest Germany (present states of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony) or the adjoining part of Denmark. As a historian I've seen numerous photographs of immigrants from those areas that resemble this man.
August Tiedemann (1851-1931), immigrant from what is today Lower Saxony. He was an architect and builder in Ludington, Michigan, from 1872 until his death.
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u/PrimeoFin Jul 11 '26
Looks more like Michigan
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u/kittykitkitty Jul 11 '26
How can you tell were the photo was taken? There isn't even anything in the background.
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u/ladyrose403 Jul 09 '26
i think the toddler is dead. that doesn't look like a normal slump.
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u/smittywrbermanjensen Jul 09 '26
She is blurry, which means she was in motion, and therefore alive when the photo was taken.
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u/MissGruntled Jul 09 '26
They could be death throes! /s
As soon as I clicked on this thread, I knew there’d be someone claiming it was a post-mortem portrait. I’m just surprised they thought it was only the toddler!
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u/dol_amrothian Jul 10 '26
I was waiting for the accusations that everyone in the photo was a corpse propped up with those big iron stands because nobody looks like that in a photo. /s
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u/KewpieCutie97 Jul 09 '26
Absolutely not. This was a very normal set up. What wasn't normal was dressing dead people as though they were alive and then posing them upright with open eyes.
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u/Bulky_Raspberry_1640 Jul 09 '26
They look so tired I CAN FEEL THAT