Every family photograph is unique, although when old photos are viewed as a body of visual historical material, the similarities between them may be more apparent than their differences. Professional Victorian studio portraits typically followed formulaic conventions in terms of their contrived settings, formal compositions and, in general, their subjects’ appearance. Even casual amateur snapshots, taken in real locations and capturing people wearing everyday or holiday clothes (not ‘Sunday best’), can look much like others originating around the same time. Our 19th- and even early/mid-20th-century predecessors tended to dress fairly similarly to one another and were, on the whole, photographed doing the same kinds of things.

Because most of our old photographs slot neatly into familiar categories, when an individual picture does not conform to expectations, it attracts attention. Features that can render a photograph especially distinctive include strange pictorial details, such as an unrecognisable article of dress, or a baffling location or setting; part of the picture may be missing or perhaps multiple images are connected in an intriguing way. Here we consider a few examples of family photographs that have inspired comment, even prompted analysis by photographic specialists. Some idiosyncrasies can be explained but others were understood only by their subjects and, perhaps, the photographer: their stories have died with them.

Multiple poses

These two photographs taken by William Hall & Son of Brighton are cabinet prints, the cabinet card/print/portrait measuring around 16.5 x 11.5cms – a popular studio format from the 1880s until World War One. Millions survive in today’s family picture collections. The examples illustrated here are dateable to the early 1890s from the subject’s appearance: her embroidered bodice, high neckline and slightly puffed sleeves. Surviving as a pair, these photographs portray the same person, a young woman who wears an identical outfit in each: clearly they were taken on the same day. In fact, when our ancestors visited their local studio for a special photograph, they usually had at least two different poses taken at the one sitting. Pose and, especially, facial expression were considered very important when creating a formal photographic portrait, particularly for these close-up head and shoulders vignette compositions, typical of the 1890s. Victorian photographers encouraged clients to strike an expression of intelligent serenity, a full-frontal pose appearing more forthright, while an angled head conveyed a sense of graceful movement.

Once the images from a sitting were processed, generally the client would be recalled to view the negatives and choose one photograph to be printed up, also selecting the style of card mount that they preferred. The vast majority of our old family studio photographs therefore represent our forebears’ favoured choice of portrait, out of two or more poses: however, unusually this young lady (as yet unidentified) has purchased two different photographs. Presumably she liked them equally and was so pleased with her appearance in both that she could not decide between the two!

Famous faces

In the past it was fashionable to collect commercially-produced photographs of important personages – members of the royal family and aristocracy, politicians, writers, actresses and so on. When passed down as heirlooms, such images should be regarded as portraits of ‘celebrities’ admired by our forebears – not likenesses of individuals personally connected to the family. However, an ancestor or relative may possibly have been photographed alongside a well-known personality of their day, or perhaps they briefly met, even photographed, somebody ‘famous’, or who subsequently became well-known, bringing added interest and even a touch of glamour to our otherwise ordinary family picture collections.

During World War Two, Walter Robert (‘Bob’) Murton served with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) in North Africa and Italy. A keen amateur photographer, like many soldiers posted overseas he took hundreds of black and white snapshot photographs recording his travels abroad and wartime experiences. Among Bob’s WW2-era snapshots inherited by his daughter Kat Williams is this slightly blurred photograph, annotated on the back: ‘Gracie Fields with Col, Adj, at Motta Sicily, November 1943’. How many soldiers were fortunate to have met the popular performer, Gracie Fields, who, as a member of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA), entertained millions of allied troops in theatres of war across the globe? Presumably Bob photographed the singer with his commanding officers when she visited Sicily, although he never related the story to his family and this special photograph remains the only record of the event.

Strange symbols

Unlike today, when clothes-wise just about anything goes, a century or more ago most people dressed according to certain norms, the fashionable ‘look’ of a given era being relatively standardised. By the early 1900s, fashion favoured a smart but relatively practical image for women, at least for everyday wear. The typical ensemble comprised a blouse (often white), worn with a dark tailored skirt that fitted the waist and hips closely before flaring gracefully towards a wide floor-length hemline. This was the characteristic style favoured by Marion Webb’s grandmother, Winifred Randall (1888-1961), when she posed outdoors for a formal photograph as a young woman. This undated photograph has been dated to c1904-09, based mainly on Winifred’s hairstyle and the flounced elbow-length sleeves of her blouse: at that time she was aged between 16 and 21, which seems to accord well with her youthful appearance in the picture. So far so good…

Studying the image, what struck me most is the inverted heart-shaped emblem outlined in white stitching on the lower part of Winifred’s skirt, a highly visible motif that bears no relation to Edwardian fashion.

Believing that it must have held some significance, I consulted symbols expert Clare Gibson, who suggested two possible meanings: either it denoted membership of an (unidentifiable) group or organisation that used an inverted heart symbol; or it may have been worn to express a broken heart or thwarted love. Interestingly, Winifred wears a ring on her engagement/wedding ring finger and yet this photograph pre-dates her marriage to Marion’s grandfather in 1912 by several years.

Could the overturned heart, combined with rings, signify a major broken relationship in Winifred’s youth, or even perhaps the death of a fiancé? Never spoken of to her descendants, this possibility, glimpsed so tantalisingly in a photograph, remains unconfirmed. Marion Webb

Torn photo

Digital image editing using advanced computer software may be simple today, but changing photographic images is nothing new, for earlier generations were not above ‘editing’ their photographs, using scissors or a knife – sometimes in rather drastic fashion. Perhaps a card-mounted print was cropped around the edges to fit into a picture frame – harmless enough; however, in other instances it is clear that a human figure has been completely removed from the scene. Where this has occurred, a family story has often been passed down, along with the vandalised picture: commonly a tale of a spouse who vanished or was evicted from the family in disgrace and was subsequently ‘forgotten’, his/her image literally expunged from the record.

One example with no known story is Patrick Davison’s photograph depicting his great great grandfather, Charles Frederick Drodge (1856-1924), dateable to the 1890s. Cut in half, raggedly and more or less vertically, the surviving image portrays Charles, but leaves a glimpse of a woman’s sleeve, indicating that he was originally photographed with a female companion. The most likely person is his wife, Elizabeth Ellen Drodge (née Vaughan), whom he had married in March 1878, but the couple enjoyed a long and stable relationship as far as descendants are aware, so a dramatic act of vengeance or the need to forget seem unlikely explanations. Patrick’s own hypothesis as to why Elizabeth was (apparently) removed from the photograph is precisely the opposite: he believes that Elizabeth herself may have cut out Charles’s likeness from their joint photograph following his death in 1924, not to deface the picture but to create a single image that she could keep – effectively a memorial portrait of her deceased husband. Patrick Davison

Post mortem photographs

Photographs taken post mortem (after death) are among the strangest images to have survived the passage of time, and arguably the most unusual. Indeed, the concept of photographing the deceased and hoarding their images has a morbid appeal for some viewers, with the result that certain websites and image sets purporting to represent post mortem photographs attract a significant, if unhealthy, interest on the internet (see for example www.wimp.com/shockingphoto). However, professional photographic historians consider the majority of this material to be sensationalist and inaccurate, especially the many erroneous images ‘identifying’ the dead propped up among their living relatives, fully-clothed in their ‘Sunday best’ with hair dressed and eyes open. Such photographs have no historical provenance and make no sense, but encourage disturbing ideas and perpetuate myths as to why post mortem photographs were taken and what they actually look like.

Post mortem photographs are in fact extremely rare in family archives, with perhaps just one occurring in every several thousand photograph collections. Genuine examples of the genre tend to depict the elderly and, above all, babies and small children whose young lives ended before their natural time. As we see from the post mortem photographs illustrated here, the recently-deceased relative was generally laid out on a bed, couch or perhaps in a coffin, older figures usually being concealed with covers. Children were often presented clothed, as they would have been in life: faces are in repose and eyes are closed, representing their subject in eternal sleep. A contemporary explanation for the commissioning of such photographs was that otherwise there existed no pictures of the deceased by which grieving family members could remember them – a logical reason and highly likely if the subject was a baby or infant. We should understand, therefore, that post mortem photographs, far from being grisly scenes, were poignant, peaceful images that offered great comfort to the bereaved.