Post Mortem Daguerreotype of a Baby Girl, Helen Maria 1849
We are back from our visit to the Daguerreian Society Symposium in Baltimore. As always we enjoyed the lectures, seeing our far flung Daguerreian friends, and the (to me) best sales show of vintage photographs. As a bonus we saw a number of our Baltimore friends and got to meet a flickr friend in person.
We bought only two images rather that the large number we usually buy but we decided to concentrate on one of our areas of interest, post mortem.
One of the images was left with our wonderful conservator for new glass but the other is shown here. The beautiful baby girl, pictured in her coffin, is Helen Maria Spalding who was born on March 8th, 1848 and died at 10 months old on January 10, 1849. I have posted a photograph of the velvet pad with a little knot of white ribbon, likely from her white gown and an obituary clipped from a newspaper.
There are those who question our interest in this genre. Yes, they make us sad but they are an important window on life in the 19th century and reflect the impact of the invention of photography on society.
Post Mortem Daguerreotype of a Baby Girl, Helen Maria 1849
We are back from our visit to the Daguerreian Society Symposium in Baltimore. As always we enjoyed the lectures, seeing our far flung Daguerreian friends, and the (to me) best sales show of vintage photographs. As a bonus we saw a number of our Baltimore friends and got to meet a flickr friend in person.
We bought only two images rather that the large number we usually buy but we decided to concentrate on one of our areas of interest, post mortem.
One of the images was left with our wonderful conservator for new glass but the other is shown here. The beautiful baby girl, pictured in her coffin, is Helen Maria Spalding who was born on March 8th, 1848 and died at 10 months old on January 10, 1849. I have posted a photograph of the velvet pad with a little knot of white ribbon, likely from her white gown and an obituary clipped from a newspaper.
There are those who question our interest in this genre. Yes, they make us sad but they are an important window on life in the 19th century and reflect the impact of the invention of photography on society.