Home Wake, 1950s: A Woman in Her Casket

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Home Wake, 1950s: A Woman in Her Casket — Archive & Atlas

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Home Wake, 1950s: A Woman in Her Casket — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-7352BB

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A woman lies in an open casket in what is plainly a private home — the floral carpet and wood furniture of a 1950s living room visible beside the bier. Home wakes were still a working assumption in that decade, the funeral parlor not yet having fully displaced the front parlor as the expected venue; a family received mourners in their own rooms, beside their own rug. Someone thought to photograph her, which was also common practice, a last record made with the same Kodak used for Christmas morning. The casket hardware is plain and functional, the satin quilted and proper, the whole arrangement expressing the period's conviction that death, handled correctly, could be made to look like sleep. Within a generation, the home wake would be nearly extinct in America, relocated to a building specifically designed to make everyone feel slightly less at home.

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