Why was it fashionable in the old days to be photographed… without a head?

Over the course of many centuries of human history, minds have always been dominated by certain fashionable trends in the fine arts, and then in photography. Installation was no exception to the rule. A particularly surprising trend of the 19th century was headless photography, which first conquered Great Britain and then other European countries, and eventually reached the United States.

Art experts are still arguing about the reasons for the popularity of such an unusual movement. Perhaps this was a great joke for its time – due to the specifics of the special Victorian humor, given their unusual perception of death: in those years, death was an everyday reality due to the lack of advanced medicine, especially antibiotics and antiseptics.

Therefore, people often played with these themes in their works, as, for example, in photographs with “ghosts” or in the equally popular posthumous portraits.

Despite its apparent simplicity, creating headless portraits required skill and meticulous work. To make such a portrait, it was necessary to use multiple exposure techniques, take dozens of frames, cut very precisely and carefully overlay elements.

The results were so convincing that such work was one of the most expensive photography services on the market! Some photographers even specialized only in this genre: they say, I’ll shoot you without a head, but I don’t need you with a head.

By the 1920s, interest in headless portraits had subsided, but should such photographs be considered completely and irrevocably outdated? Let’s just remember 2011, when such images again became hype on social networks!