Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Some More Creative Wakes and Funeral Selfies

I haven't updated here in a while, but today I read about New Orleans socialite Mickey Easterling who left specific instructions to be propped up with a cigarette and champagne flute at her wake.


From that link I found that a couple months ago a boxer named Christopher Rivera Amaro was posed in his boxing garb so that visitors could take pictures with him:


In addition to these photography-friendly funerals, there is also a "trend" of funeral selfies that has been making a lot of people uncomfortable lately (examples shown on this Tumblr dedicated to selfies taken at funerals), a phenomenon parodied in The Hangover III. 






For those who don't already know, though, this isn't necessarily a modern phenomenon.  When photography was less ubiquitous and more expensive, post-mortem photography--with both corpse and living relatives posed in life-reminiscent situations--might be the only opportunity a less-affluent family would have to get a picture of a recently-deceased loved one.


In the case of my own family, I found photographs of dead people dating from the 1970s and 1980s, so it's not like it ever really went away.

So taking pictures posing with the deceased or at their funerals really isn't as weird as people would have it, it's just done for the exact opposite reason:  While early on people would take pictures of their dead relatives because there were few opportunities to get pictures of them to begin with, people take pictures of their dead relatives now because photography is so ubiquitous that there are few contexts in which people aren't willing to take pictures.