For your upcoming Halloween enjoyment – Victorian Era (1800’s) Headless Photographs. Either they used some dark room manipulation or the Legend of Sleepy Hollow may have a ring of truth to it.
1800s:
Victorian headless photographs
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- My Head on a Plate as Requested Madame
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- Easier to braid your hair.
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- You said to remove my top.
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- Cheeky
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- He looks a bit stuck up to me
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- Great, now the top of my head smells like underarm
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- Me too.
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- His wife did have a good head on her shoulders
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- I can imagine sending this to an enemy to intimidate them
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- Mrs. Headless Horseman
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- Dignified, perhaps he plans to place it upon that pedestal.
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- Even beats Kaiser Soze’s gesture.
Michael Bradley - Time Traveler 
LOVE THIS! Very spooky 😀
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Bizarre but entertaining!
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Reblogged this on miftahulhuda234.
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Hilarious!!! 🙂
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Those are actual photos from the 1800s too, which just goes to show they had the same twisted humor that we do now. Most of the old photos show no expression because the photos took a long time to expose, so you had to hold still for almost a minute. So, most people held their breath and had no expression so their face would not blur. It was also too expensive to take a bunch of extra shots.
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This is just absolutely great at showing how the first thing humans tend to do with new technology is something fun. You know, I’ve come across a lot of ‘Victorian’ photoshop over these past few months, in particular, photos where people are ‘cut and pasted’ in. There’s a whole set of photos of Queen Victoria and her children where it’s quite clear some weren’t there that day. 😉
Here’s another neat read I found a while back that I think you might like! http://www.fourandsix.com/photo-tampering-history/
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I got these from Retronaut which is usually pretty good at filtering submissions.
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Yeah, I’ve seen those and I thought they were very impressive to consider they did them back before photoshop. Lincoln’s widow carried around a picture that was taken of her after her husband’s death that showed him standing behind her as a ghost, his hand on her shoulder comforting him. It gave her great relief to her death bed. It is now believed that photographer was a confidence artist who would double expose prints with an old picture of a loved one ghosted on a new picture. Even now they are not sure exactly how he did it.
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I wrote badly before! I meant that it was the Victorians themselves who doctored (‘photoshopped’) the photos by physically adding double-exposures or negatives to negatives. Here’s what I mean: http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw204167/Queen-Victoria-with-her-family?LinkID=mp04634&search=sas&sText=queen+victoria&wPage=1&role=sit&rNo=38
Although the caption doesn’t state it, it just seems like some people in Victoria’s family have been added in later!
And that is a great fact about Lincoln! It’s funny how much our attitude towards death has changed, huh? It used to be quite common to display a death mask or a death photo (McCord Museum in Montreal has some very touching ones of dead children taken for their grieving parents in the 19th century). But now it’s considered creepy to grieve.
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Here is the Lincoln link: http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/lincolns-ghost/ I figured out what you meant by my second reply. 🙂
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Awesome!!! Thanks!! 🙂
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