Can you imagine walking down the street and seeing someone being photographed the deceased with their loved ones? Although it sounds a bit disturbing, in the second half of the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century this type of practice was very common in Mexico.

To preserve the physical memory of the short life of the deceased children, Mexican families used to take portraits of them. It is worth mentioning that photography was not so common at that time, although today everyone has a camera on their mobile phones.

This ritual originated in Europe and came to America in the 18th century, known as La muerte niña. Before photography became popular and widespread, it was customary to portray infants who had died through painting.

The people who did this work represented them aslittle angels reaching heaven and sought to give the impression that they were alive. It was a more common practice in the upper class, since someone doing a painting at that time was very expensive.

The name “little angels” came from a tradition in New Spain times, where the deceased from zero to 13 years of age were only called that name and that they had been baptized. Through this word they expressed the purity of the little ones who were free and sin.

Later, thanks to the arrival of the photographic camera, this tradition was able to become a practice accessible to the middle class and lower class, since it was cheaper to pay photographers than painters.

It was even so popular that it became very common to find advertisements in newspapers of people advertising their photography services post mortem at home, although the fact that they went to the families' homes implied an extra expense.

To start with the portraits, the family had to prepare the person and choose their best clothes and make them as much as possible. Sometimes the dead person was portrayed alone, with family, pets, etc.; the style of photography depended on the requests of the family.

In those days, photographs of the deceased were seen as part of the grieving process for the loss of a loved one, they did not have a negative or morbid connotation as perhaps would happen today.

According to the historian Claudia Canales, taking a portrait was a kind of ceremony, “a social rite whose importance was accentuated by the elements that technique and fashion required to use”.

As the practice was carried out throughout the country, various prominent photographers emerged throughout the Republic, such as José Antonio Bustamante Martínez in Zacatecas, Rutilo Patiño and Romualdo García< /b> in Guanajuato and the Casasola brothers in Mexico City.

One of the most prominent was Romualdo García, born in Silao, Guanajuato, in February 1852. He had a particular technique in his style that intensified the demand for this type of photography, which is why he who is considered one of the exponents of post mortemportraits.

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