Wisconsin Death Trip

i just uploaded on to my computer some pictures of my cats from my digital camera. i can save the ones that i like and delete the ones that i don't (the ones that i "don't like" just simply mean that Ludo wasn't looking at the camera, so he just looks like a black pillow or shadow or something...) A few months back i was describing online a compound bow to a friend... And i stopped what i was doing and said "hang on, let me e-mail you a picture). She lives in Atlanta and got to see the bow over a thousand miles away in an instant.

Even my cell phone has a camera-- i didn't buy it for that feature and i rarely use it, but it is still there.

But back in the 1800's photography was so rare and expensive, many people were not photographed until... they were dead. i saw a photo of an entire dead family; mom, dad, three/four children, dead of TB (or "consumption"), all propped up in chairs and their Sunday best, eyeballs painted on their eyelids... And this wasn't Crime scene photography, this was family portrait stuff. Little Susie just died? Well, the family is all here; this is a good time to take a family portrait with little dead Susie in the middle.

In the late 1800's post-mortem photography was quite an art form...Okay, maybe calling it an "art form" is a stretch, but it was morbidly common and not taboo. Some of these photos were taken more realistically with the subject laid out to rest in their coffin. Often a person would only have one or two photos taken of them in their entire life. If one hadn't been taken in life, well, one would be taken in death...

Photography is so commonplace in this day and age that it has lost its permanency. Add to that Photoshop and other digital enhancing, and you might not even be able to believe what you see anymore. But then again i guess a little paint on a dead child's eyelids is just a primitive form of Photoshop...

(oh, and for you non-Wisconsinites, Wisconsin Death Trip is the title of a book that came out about 20 years ago that happens to include some post-mortem photography. don't want anyone to think that it is a suicide reference...)