DAY 5:
Model: Eileen Hollis
“Tempus Fugit, Memento Mori”
Time flies, remember death. During the rampant spread of Typhoid during the Victorian era, people came face to face with death at an incredibly high rate. As a way to memorialize their loved ones who had passed, many people would hire photographers to capture portraits post-mortem. Photography was a very new technology and required that the subject of the photograph remain still for a very long time, so post-mortem portraits were a natural solution to capturing a person’s likeness.
We teamed up with Eileen Hollis to re-create and attempt to capture the intimacy and eerie beauty of Victorian Era post-mortem portraits. If you don’t know Eileen personally, you may recognize her from TikTok where she “is demystifying death and educating the world about their funeral service options”. We got inspired for this shoot by the stunning interiors of Hollis Funeral Home when Jess was there snapping updated headshots for the Hollis Funeral Home team. Full time mortician/sometimes model, Eileen is a natural in front of the camera! We call her in anytime one of our clients needs a model with a little bit of spunk and an incredible smile. Once in a while, you can see her rolling around the 1911 and Beak & Skiff Research instagrams.
