Found photo: odd gentleman and family, 1860s Sussex

Josh sez, "Steerforth collects and blogs about discarded books, diaries and photos from his work in Sussex, England. His latest find is an album of photos from the 1860s.The first photo appears to be of Frankenstein's monster and his family."

Almost Lost Forever (Thanks, Josh!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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jacques45

This is like the Haunted Mansion effect. You show what could be considered a bit creepy picture, and then slowly the room slides down to reveal…..the monster has a California Cheeseburger set for his lunch!
Anonymous

I don’t know if it’s an artifact of the long exposure, but the spooky child seems to have far too many fingers on his/her right hand…
Slowermo

If that guy is dead I think this is him recently re-animated.
LightningRose

She looks like the old man in the animated film, “Up”.
sapere_aude

If you think the cropped photo above looks creepy, the uncropped version looks much, much creepier. The child (girl?) in the photo looks like something out of a horror movie (and her head doesn’t seem to fit properly on her body).

BTW, when you look at the uncropped photo, it becomes fairly clear that the guy in the photo isn’t dead — undead perhaps; but animate enough to be capable of holding a (demon) child.
- Annika
  
  You’re right, from that pic, you can see clearly that the guy is alive (though actually someone in the comments suggested the kid might not be… but maybe it’s just 21st century people being a bit obsessed with the whole topic of post-mortem pics). By the way, the blog is really interesting. Too bad it doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed…
  - sapere_aude
    
    I think it’s just that, nowadays, we’re not accustomed to people looking so stiff and emotionally blank in photos. We’re used to seeing photos of people relaxed and smiling. Back then, when people posed for photos they tried to maintain a perfect posture, remaining as still as possible, and erasing all trace of emotion from their face. Today, when we see someone looking that wooden and that emotionless, we think they look dead. So, we find it a bit shocking to see how people looked in these really old photos, when the accepted way to pose was so radically different from what it is today.
    - Annika
      
      Yeah, that’s of course also true. Social convention combined with the need for very long exposure times made people pose very differently for photos, which seems strange to us today. But it seems to be pretty well established that the custom of taking pics of dead people actually existed. It’s just that its very hard to tell, and I guess many modern people would mistake pics of people who were perfectly alive for post-mortem pics because of the way the people look on the photo.
    - Donald Petersen
      
      Today, when we see someone looking that wooden and that emotionless, we think they look dead.
      
      Well, it ain’t the wooden lack of emotion that makes this guy look dead to me.
      
      It’s the fact that he looks to be desiccated, sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked, and at least 137 years old.
      
      Plus, I don’t see a lack of emotion. The emotion I detect is a burning hatred and irresistible hunger for the still-beating hearts of the living.
      
      I suppose it’s a testament to good ol’ modern American food preservatives that you just don’t see this kind of ugly walking (or shambling) the streets anymore.
  - Michael Smith
    
    Too bad it doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed…
    It has meta tags pointing to an RSS feed so you should be able to put the blog URL directly into your reader.
- shadowfirebird
  
  He would have been held up with wires or a stand. Given the long exposure times, that was common for living subjects, too.
  - Annika
    
    Exactly. In some pics, you can see it a bit.
Anonymous

You rang?
ROSSINDETROIT

Clearly, the woman is a witch, the ‘child’ her familiar and the man a zombie.
Dave Faris

I’ll bet the man had blue eyes. The photo plates in the 1860′s were not sensitive to blue, so it rendered it as white. This is why you’ll never see a fluffy white cloud floating in an azure sky in a photo taken in 1865. His eyes probably didn’t look half as weird as they do in the photo.
- Annika
  
  That’s interesting… do you have a source for that? Or can you explain why it was like that? I heard about the long exposure times (which is probably why the lady’s eyes look “blurred”) but I hadn’t heard about the photo plates not being sensitive to blue. I love photography, so I find this rather fascinating…
  - Dave Faris
    
    I learned about it in an art history class, and I apparently remembered it exactly wrong. The printing process (known as collodion plate printing) was MORE sensitive to blue, not less. From the wiki entry on the process : “The collodion process has its own bias in translating colour into black and white tones. Any warm colour will appear dark, any cold colour uniformly light. A sky with clouds in it is impossible to render, since blue and white are equally cold. Lemons and tomatoes appear a shiny black and a blue and white tablecloth appears plain white. Victorian sitters who in collodion photographs look as if they are in mourning might have been wearing bright yellow or pink.”
bjacques

I read somewhere that smiling for the camera only came in with snapshots. Before that a photo was (for most) a portrait for those who couldn’t afford to be painted, so they had to look as formal as possible.
Robert

Almost always in postmortem photographs, the subject is shown sleeping because the eyes are closed. Like this one. In this one it’s pretty obvious who is the dead one. And this one is just frikkin’ creepy.

So probably grandpa’s just toothless and grumpy.
knoxblox

Wow! That boating photo almost looks like Monet and Renoir scouting locations.
bwcbwc

IIRC this is like the 19th century version of red-eye. I remember seeing a shot of John Brown of abolitionist fame with the same glowy eye-thingies.
Dan Mac

I have seen a photo of the first couple before this, makes me wish for a search engine I could input a picture into to find matches.
- chgoliz
  
  There is: TinEye.
  
  http://www.tineye.com
  - Dan Mac
    
    thx
Snig

The cragginess made me think of acromegaly, but nose is a little wrong and the hands aren’t huge. He could also just feel the kid fidgeting, and is trying to restrain emotion. The kid is either fidgeting or has serious polydactyly on the right.
charmingquark

Are you sure that’s not Lurch?
TinSoldier

The Munsters!
Stefan Jones

Looks like the kind of photo that Terry Gilliam would appropriate for Monty Python animations.
rebdav

I think it took >30 sec to get a full exposure on the old glass plate film. You can see the shmearing in both of their eyes, they probably had to come back next day for a no-refunds pickup when it was already too late for a retake. As for the weird face, it appears that he might missing his natural teeth. For all we know he thinks this was a cool mug for the camera or maybe he was just creepy old granpappy who scared the grandkids on visits.
- Stefan Jones
  
  My bet is on Man-O-War class case of constipation.
Glossolalia Black

I just can’t imagine them having sex.
- Donald Petersen
  
  I can. And damn, but I am so sorry I can.
Michael Smith

I always wonder, how different will it be in 2150? Will people of that time puzzle over our photographs? These people seem further from us than native people in South America or Africa.
Anonymous

I know people didn’t smile in photos back then, but it is creepy to the groups of kids and not one of them smiling.
Annika

Robert, I’m afraid your links don’t work, which is a pity because I’d be interested in seeing those pics.
Annika

Can’t seem to get the Reply system right… anyway… I’ll try to just put the rest of what I want to write into one post.

So, Dave, thanks a lot for your detailed answer and Wiki link. I had been wondering why just about everyone in old pics seemed to be wearing dark clothes. Of course, if any warm color looked like this, it would be pretty logical.

Snig, you’re perfectly right. I overlooked the detail of the child seeming to have too many fingers. Thanks for pointing it out. That of course pretty much rules out the possibility of the child being dead, unless we want to make up a creepy horror story, which might be fun but not all that likely. Maybe the head looks odd because the kid’s dress was displaced by the old gentleman trying to hold the kid still between his legs? Just guessing, but it might be. Bet this lace stuff was pretty stiff.

Michael, thanks, I’ll try it. Bookmarking a blog simply isn’t the same as getting the posts in my reader.
shadowfirebird

One possible explanation: the gentleman in the photo may have been dead.

I seem to remember that one of the more bizarre Victorian fads was for portraits with the newly deceased.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-mortem_photography
- Anonymous
  
  Well, if he were dead I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be the kid between his knees. Mind you the kid looks pretty similar – maybe he’s dead too.
- Annika
  
  Yep, thought of that too. I remember reading too pretty creepy blog posts on the subject. But it’s pretty hard to tell imho…
sapere_aude

Hugh Laurie and Robin Williams?

(Looks like Hugh is trying mighty hard not to laugh at whatever Robin just said.)
Temujin

If you look at the full pic, they are propping what looks like a dead little girl up on his knees (that’s why the kid’s head seems to rest so oddly on the body).

Given that, it would be obvious that the parents / grandparents could be rather upset about the situation, even while memorializing it.

Before looking at the full pic, it was very odd to look at the man’s face full of repressed fury and the wonan’s face of sadness, and then when you bring a dead child into the picture it all of a sudden becomes very understandable.
- bobsyeruncle
  
  Ok. So it’s a dead polydactylous child who’s NOT fidgeting. right.
- sapere_aude
  
  I don’t think she’s dead. She appears to be moving her right hand. (Thanks to Anon #40 for calling that to my attention.)
Anonymous

another possibility is that he is blind
Geoff

He bares a strong resemblance to Andross from Starfox 64.
philipb

Google maps takes us on a little trip of Ambleside where I believe we may have found the church prominent in the landscape photograph?

http://tinyurl.com/29x45nu

Take it from here History Detectives.
penguinchris

The blog post mentions that someone put the box of photos in the trash, and then it was very luckily recovered by a trash picker.

Now, I understand throwing stuff out. I really do, and I very recently didn’t – I have hoarding tendencies. I have piles and piles of stuff I need to sort through and get rid of, and most of it has no value – not collectible value, not sentimental value, not practical value. Stuff no one will find interesting in 150 years.

But… who in their right mind throws out a box of photos like this? If you don’t know what to do with it and want to get rid of it, take it to the local historical society (and in Sussex I’m sure they have one). At least tell someone else about it who might not be so stupid. What an idiot, seriously. Like the blog says, one can only cringe at the thought of how much other stuff like this has been lost because people just tossed it.

Like I said, not everything has value and should be kept. Often it isn’t obvious whether it does or not, which is a big reason why people hoard stuff. But in cases like this, it’s quite obvious.
- audaxaxon
  
  penguinchris. It surprising that things like this get thrown out. However, from personal experience it’s pretty common. one time a nearby town hall put out boxes of architectural documents, showing dates back to the 1870′s, onto the street. These were a heavy cloth rag type of paper that rolled up into scrolls. They featured exquisite examples of inked technical drawings and penmanship, which of course is all but a lost art today, at least for municipal planning documents. Another time in New Orleans, my friend and I found a box of 70′s real-to-real tapes, only after getting a couple of them home did we discover that they contained a calling card “from the library of Jerry Garcia”. It’s pretty amazing what gets put out into the trash.