Hello, all! Back from my vacation!

I had a wonderful and varied trip, which culminated in a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art this past Monday. My husband (a history teacher) and I visited the amazing and poignant exhibit called Photography and the American Civil War, which you should go visit if humanly possible, if you’re a Civil War fan.

Here’s one cool part of the exhibit, a photographer’s studio posing stand, which I’ve never seen up close before.

It was a standard fixture in every nineteenth century portrait gallery, used to hold the sitter’s head rigid during the long exposure times. (I blogged about old-fashioned photos here, and why they took so long and why people tended not to smile.)

Here’s another and more macabre way photographers used these stands: to prop up dead people in order to take their photo. You can see one in this picture. Yes, the guy is dead. I know.

For more about why such post-mortem pictures were so common, you can read that post. There are many heartbreaking pictures of dead children visible if you do an online search, but I haven’t posted any because I find them too sad.