I was speaking with a gathering of people who had experienced the premature loss of loved ones. These were not the kinds of deaths due to old age, the losses were of young people, people who had been taken far too early.

The subject of photography came up. Many chimed in that they regretted not having certain pictures of beloved people who are now forever gone. They felt an aching absence of group photos or snapshots of particular moments that were meaningful to them. This moved me very deeply, to hear the anguish of people who felt that moments had slipped by undocumented and now there was nothing to be done about it.

I have only three very precious family photos that include all five of us as a family. This is because I was the family photographer, always behind the camera. So there are thousands of beautiful, spontaneous photos of the children with their father - there are only three of all of us together when I handed the camera to a bystander. These three photos are staged, and not as evocative of feeling as most of our pictures. I enjoy them, but wish I had done things differently now.

And then, there were the pictures of our family trip to Leavenworth, Washington from fall 2002. For years I grieved the possibility that I had lost those photos due to computer upgrade confusion... and was morose over the idea. When I found regular print photos of the trip in a box one day - I was overjoyed. Then I remembered that we had left on the trip without the digital camera by accident and had to swing into a convenience market to buy a disposable camera. I was both relieved and thrilled to have these precious pictures back in the archive of family treasures.

A Problem as Old as Photography Itself
Our ancestors might open our minds to different ways of understanding photography and death. For instance, it was convention in the 19th century to pose with personal items, like purses or scarves - that represented absent or dead relatives. This was a method to include them, emotionally, in the picture. Post-mortem photography (also called memorial portraiture or memento mori) were prevalent in the mid-1800s when daguerreotype made photography accessible to the general public. Photographing the recently deceased was a way of producing a keepsake... this is still practiced in parts of central Europe. In India, it is a tradition to paste head shots of absent family members into wedding photographs. Culturally, these kinds of photos are not perceived of as trickery, but a way to honor someone that was not present. 

In present-day America, photo manipulation typically evokes jokes around the deleting of an ex-partner from a dozen years of vacation photographs with Photoshop, scissors or a magic marker… or to remove wrinkles or dark circles under the eyes.

As well, we hire professional photographic retouchers as a response to a media-saturated world which sets an impossible standard. Since all images of the beautiful and famous are enhanced, ordinary people use retouchers to remove blemishes or double chins from photos to be posted on such pedestrian venues as Facebook.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who are mourning the loss of all photos of beloved people and moments through disaster.

An example. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast of the United States. Katrina victims, many of them having lost everything, found that rebuilding their photo libraries was among the hardest tasks. I read about what the organizers called a "Katrina Shower" - like a baby shower - where people gathered to shower a person with items needed to rebuild. Among the gifts were photos that others had in their collection that might have meaning to the recipient. I was also moved to read about a company that offered free image hosting to Katrina victims.

But, behind the scenes, something else has been going on that is seldom discussed. People have hired professional photographic retouchers to create composite portraits of live and deceased people. Such manipulations demonstrate imagination born out of love and loss. This dates back to very early photography.

Imagination and memory have never been subject to literal reality - they are always some form of revision. Photography, as well, has always participated in varying levels of distortion. The same photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by adjusting the color and tone of the image. 

In the next post, we will discuss ways to deal with the lack of good photos of your beloveds.