Peaceful Ironies: The History and Aesthetics of Postmortem Photography in Quebec and Ontario (19th and 20th Centuries)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper contributes to the nascent field of the history of photography in Canada, and more specifically the history of postmortem photography. It explores the practice of this custom in Quebec and Ontario during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing in particular on the aesthetics of over 100 images that the author consulted in ten different archives from either province. \n \nThe paper emphasizes the correlation between early postmortem photographs and the movement to develop rural cemeteries in Victorian Canada. It also explores the development of postmortem photography in Canada over time, expressing how the custom ceased to be a primarily bourgeois practice around the First World War. It has found that postmortem photography was increasingly adopted by middle and working-class Canadians over time, until death became a taboo subject around the mid-twentieth century. \n \nWhile the history of postmortem photography has recently seen important developments, including Audrey Linkman’s Photography and Death in 2011, research on the custom as it was practiced in Canada has been relatively shallow. Furthermore, earlier studies of the ritual have emphasized how gleaning socio-cultural information from the pictures is of much higher value to the historian than reading them intrinsically, and actually caution against looking at the visual aesthetics of the photographs explicitly. To challenge this dictum, this paper has researched and concentrated almost exclusively on the aesthetics of postmortem photographs, demonstrating how an aesthetically-focused study of the source material actually can yield useful and important information to the historian. The distinct correlation between the aesthetic of these photographs and the nineteenth-century movement to create new, rural cemeteries in Victorian cities, for instance, is a relevant discovery for the history of postmortem photography and the culture of death in Canada both, which had not yet been made in existing studies of the ritual.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".