Getty Museum
Postmortem of a Child
Creator
Carl DurheimSwiss Photographer · 1810–1890
All works by this person →Carl or Charles Durheim was a lithographer and photographer with a studio in Bern, Switzerland. According to a label affixed on the back of one of his daguerreotypes, his studio specialized in lithography, pen and crayon drawings, *cartes-de-visite*, and daguerreotype portraits. The studio also featured a glass pavilion, a sure selling point in the early years when photographs were made using sunl
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- about 1852
- Medium
- Hand-colored daguerreotype
- Culture
- Swiss
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
The careful and sensitive arrangement of this child's body and bedclothes, the choice of viewpoint, and the reliance upon light to create a sense of reality, individuality, and remoteness demonstrate Charles Durheim's skill as a daguerreotypist. The girl's tiny hands are clasped delicately across her middle as if sleeping, and the photograph's horizontal orientation reinforces the nineteenth-century idea of death as "eternal slumber." In the mid-1800s, it became common to use the new medium of photography to create a *memento mori* such as this one. Many families commissioned photographers to record the corpses of loved ones just prior to burial.
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