Victorian headless portraits were a fad in Britain in the late 19th century. In the photographs, the model’s head appears separated from the body; often the sitter holds it in their own hands.[1] Although this genre is called headless portraiture, it is the head that is always present in the photograph, and the body may be absent.
An early example of the genre is photographer Oscar Gustave Rejlander’s Head of St. John the Baptist in a Charger, a print made by combining two different negatives…
Many later photographers created similar images of men and women with severed heads, depicted held in their hands, laid on a platter or held aloft by the hair. Often in the other hand, the sitter carries the weapon of their own murder. The demand for such photographs was so high that many Victorian photographers openly advertised this particular type of photography.
Damn and wow. I’m familiar with stuff like inserting paper fairies in to photos (which famously fooled A.C. Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes), but ordinarily think of photos as being very serious in tone from this era. Pretty hilarious that some people got up to this stuff…
Okay this is pretty funny given the limitations of the tech at the time. I could see this just becoming a thing again organically, but worse because it’s AI slop or some shitty short form vertical tiktok clanker-voice trash.
