Difficult Images: A Family’s Hidden Photographs of Grief and Mourning

Abstract

Family albums are filled with photographs celebrating the happy times. These represent the high points in life, such as birthdays, holidays, and weddings as well as ordinary moments of domestic life. But what of more difficult images? Rarely included in the family album are photographs of funerals, deaths, and expressions of grief. Consequently, the focus of this article is a private collection of difficult photographs, hidden from view and left out of the family archive; the images unmistakably depict a family deep in mourning. Taken in 1975 at a funeral and burial, the family is pictured grieving their loss in an unusually public way. These images offer a rare opportunity to examine the representation of intimate and difficult emotions in private photographs, while asking questions about the function of the family archive. Using Jacques Derrida’s reflections on death, mourning, and the archive, as well as Roland Barthes’ observations in Camera Lucida, I have argued for difficult images to be included and shared in the family album. Here I maintain that difficult images depicting difficult emotions offer an opportunity to enhance photography’s storytelling capacity in the inter-generational experience of family. This examination is further contextualized alongside photography’s longstanding connection to death.

Keywords:

• Family photographs
• family albums
• family archives
• funeral photographs
• picturing grief and mourning
• hidden photographs

Notes

Notes

1 Coincidentally, my son is born on the same day as his great grandfather’s death, in the early hours of 27 October 2009.

2 St Maroun was the founder of the Maronite Church which originated in Mount Lebanon. Maronite Christians adhere to Roman Catholicism. The Maronite monks served and continue to serve a large community of Maronite Catholics who migrated to Australia from Lebanon.

3 Susan Sontag argued that we have become desensitized to witnessing the death and horror represented daily in the media. According to Sontag, this is due to our gaze being over-saturated with images of people suffering in wars and famines among other catastrophes.

4 This recalls Louis Kaplan’s (2017, 134) assertion that humor is often employed as a tactic, utilized as an antidote to death and morbidity and as a way of dealing with difficult subject matter.

5 It is worth noting that the family album today consists of digital images rather than printed ones. These digital images exist on smart phones, on personal computers, but also on public image sites such as Facebook and Instagram. For an in-depth study of family photographic practices in the digital era, see Rose (2010).

6 Photographs of my grandparents’ three deceased babies are also absent from the family archive. In the 1970s, photographing stillborn babies was taboo. Today, there is a healthy discussion about the role that photography can play in healing and addressing the grief of families who lose a new born baby (see Palmer 2017).

7 A friend noted (in email correspondence on 2 February 2018): “I love the call for including the traumatic photograph in the family archive. And the divorces, and affairs. And separations. And alcoholism. And all the rest of the observations that Family Life involves.”

8 Digital technology and social media offer new platforms for publicly grieving the loss of loved ones (see St John 2006).

9 Interestingly, many of the Instagram images adopt humor as an avoidance strategy. In Photography and Humour (2017), Kaplan examines the connection between humor, death, and photography. Kaplan considers Barthes’ “inextricable linking” of photography to death, pointing to the paradox of photography; always capturing a past (a death) in the attempt to “preserve” the continuous loss of ourselves through time (133). He acknowledges that mourning offers a sincere and “respectful” response to photography’s “ceaseless (re)production of death in the image” but asserts that there are other modes of mourning that should be recognized. Humor and laughing is one such mode (133).

10 See https://thefuneralphotographer.com.au (accessed 24 January 2018).

Additional information

Cherine Fahd is an academic, artist and writer working in the field of photography. She holds a doctorate from Monash University, Melbourne and is Director of Photography at the University of Technology Sydney.