Halloween is over with but my love for the dark and creepy lasts all year round. I was thinking back to my time when I worked at the Picture People aka where photographers go to die by selling their artistic souls for an $18 Big Bundle package. We had a bunch of generic poses we did in photo sessions, eighteen to be exact (they had a fascination with the number eighteen) but one pose always stuck out to me as being really, really weird.
In my head I called it “dementor mom”, you know, like the things from the Harry Potter books?
Anyways, everyone just acted like it was normal so I never said how weird it was. When babies were fussy and couldn’t sit for the 1/500 of a second it took me to take their photo we would cover the mom in a black blanket, head and all, (or a white blanket, whatever matched the backdrop) and have her hold the baby so when the photo was taken it just looked like the baby was floating. We could up the contrast and dodge out so lines to make the lump in the blankets holding the baby not very noticeable but back in the day, well, they weren’t so clever.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, this is what it looked like. Here are some pretty well preserved film photographs:
Yeahhhh. Creepy right. I guess they worked with what they had. Let me tell you though, it doesn’t look any less creepy nowadays either. Just less noticeable. Imagine finding one of these photographs in a shoebox in grandma’s attic one day.
Visual Individual 
Hi, those are “memento mori”, which means the mother was dead when they took the pictures.