EVERYDAY PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOURNING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Introduction

Photography has been associated with death and used for mourning practices since its inception.¹ The invention of photography had a profound influence on how people remember and mourn the dead. Nowadays, the constant availability of mobile phone cameras, digital networks, social platforms, and new printing technologies have changed the kinds of photographs which are taken and how they are shared and displayed. The main question that this special issue examines is whether this socio-technological transition, caused by a shift in digital and technological cultures, affects photographic mourning practices, and how? While the digital shift in photography has been extensively documented and debated in academic literature, its impact on private and public mourning practices has remained largely unaddressed. This special issue of photographies aims to shed light on the interplay between digital everyday photography and mourning in the 21^st century.

In 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and when many areas were still in lockdown, we released a call for papers for a special issue titled ‘Everyday Photography and Mourning in the 21^st Century.’ We received an overwhelming response to the call; proof that many researchers, authors, and artists are currently looking into the relationship between photography, mourning, and new technologies. Through a competitive peer-reviewed process, seven papers were selected — six of them appear in this issue and one appeared in the previous issue (volume 15, issue 3). Although one of the papers appeared in the previous issue, all seven papers are introduced and discussed here. This editorial begins by outlining the ways digital technologies change how the dead are mourned and describes the role of photography in this process. It then introduces the articles and finally discusses how digital technologies, and the novel mourning practices addressed in the articles, may contribute to challenging the boundaries of societal conventions and to propelling specific political claims to the forefront.

Do digital technologies change how the dead are mourned?

The evolution of mourning practices

Mourning practices are not monolithic, evolve through time, and can be specific to ethnic and socio-economic groups, cultural traditions, religious orientation, or individual preferences. In many cultures, mourning practices include rituals and ceremonies which range from the wake to the funeral. Mourning practices are of great importance for the grieving process: they acknowledge death, legitimize grief, and help the bereaved navigate their grief in a safe and supportive community environment.²

It has been argued that modern Western societies have lost touch with many of these traditional rituals and ceremonies. The French historian Philippe Ariès, who was credited with introducing death as a historical field of study, divided the history of death into four distinct periods.³ For the last period, that spans from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he stated that death, but also mourning, was ‘forbidden.’ He argued that the hospital, as a place of dying alone, and the pursuit of an ever-happy life, lead to a compulsion to avoid emotions. Consequently, in most Western societies, the bereaved are expected to continue their everyday activities, let go of the dead, and move on in life; to look into the future rather than linger in the past. However, recent research reveals a more nuanced understanding of grief that demands ‘“keeping hold” as a basic condition for moving on.’⁴ Seeing the lifeless body and sensing the reality of death, taking the necessary time to grieve for the loss of a loved one, paying tribute to the deceased’s life, and establishing ‘continuing bonds’⁵ with the deceased, is what makes mourning for many a healthy and indispensable practice. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that digital technologies have the potential to provide opportunities and alternative spaces that can support mourners in meeting some of these needs.

Recently, death researchers have argued that digital technologies are creating a shift in mourning practices by providing the much-needed space for communal mourning.⁶ Tony Walter outlined three historical periods with different mourning practices: (a) family/community mourning during pre-industrial times, (b) private mourning during the 20^th century, and (c) public mourning at the turn of the millennium.⁷ Walter et al. argued that while in the 20^th century the dying were hidden in hospitals or nursing homes and mourning was primarily private, digital networks and social media made death more visible, brought mortality closer to home, and facilitated a return to community mourning, much like before the industrial revolution.⁸ Furthermore, apart from technology, forces like the emergence of death studies, those of death positive movements, and death as a recurring theme in art photography⁹ have played a crucial role in increasing awareness and discussions around death.¹⁰

One can argue that any neat division of historical periods of mourning practices is an overgeneralization of perceptions of death and mourning, especially when culture, ethnicity, or socio-economic backgrounds are not seriously taken into consideration. To start with, even in the USA, the place par excellence of Ariès’s ‘forbidden death,’ various mourning practices have always co-existed dependent on and related to individual ethnicity, race, and socio-economic background.¹¹ Ethnicity, race and socio-economic background still influence how people mourn. Furthermore, expressing grief publicly in digital networks often takes place simultaneously with private and more traditional forms of mourning. Sharing grief publicly and online might only be one of many expressions of grief.

In conclusion, traditional mourning practices in Western societies might not have completely faded, but they are shifting and evolving into the digital world. The 21^st century with its proliferation of digital technologies, social media, and mobile phone cameras, presents a powerful socio-technological trend that unavoidably influences the way we die, mourn, and remember.

Online memorials

One way in which digital technologies have influenced mourning and our relationship with the dead are the proliferation of online memorials (such as memorialised social media accounts of the deceased, dedicated social media pages, or websites created by the bereaved after a death). Currently, Facebook hosts tens of millions of memorial pages for deceased account users and this number is increasing every day.¹² Online memorials provide a space where strangers, as well as those who knew the deceased, can mourn, honour the dead, provide comfort for the bereaved, and even nurture ongoing relationships with the dead for years to come.¹³

One of the early findings from research on online memorials was that they were not designed to be like formal obituaries but were used by individuals to communicate with like-minded mourners or directly with the deceased.¹⁴ Even mere acquaintances to the deceased feel the need to join in and share their experience of grief.¹⁵ As a result, social networking sites provide an expansion of public mourning both temporally, spatially, and socially.¹⁶ Temporally, because the online relationship and continued interaction with the dead and fellow mourners can last for years. Spatially, because people from different geographic areas and regions can join in and mourn together. And socially because people who wouldn’t normally attend a funeral, such as the broader circle of friends and acquaintances, can participate in the mourning process.

However, as Michael Arnold et al. remind us, ‘commercial practices work in tandem with emergent social practices to shape the commemorative digital landscape.’¹⁷ If commercial interests decide to suddenly stop hosting online memorials, what will happen to all the photographs, comments, and texts that make up our online relationship with the dead? What will happen to our communities of mourning? The commemorative digital landscape is unavoidably affected by decisions taken by companies that offer the social platforms that make online memorials possible. This has far-reaching implications for who controls memories and communities of mourning, and who thus governs how we remember and mourn in the future.

Communities of mourning and disenfranchised grief

According to Kenneth J. Doka, ‘disenfranchised grief can be defined as the grief experienced by those who incur a loss that is not, or cannot be, openly acknowledged, publicly mourned or socially supported.’¹⁸ Examples of disenfranchised grief can be grief for deaths of a generally unacknowledged or undervalued relationship (death of pets, death of gamers in multiplayer games), grief for the deaths of those who lost their lives due to taboo circumstances (AIDS-related death, death by suicide), or grief for deaths that go unnoticed by others (neonatal death, death of an undisclosed partner, death of a beloved celebrity).¹⁹ Lisa D. Hensley researched the deaths of loved ones whom the bereaved knew only from online communities, such as communities on Facebook, on chat sites, or in online games.²⁰ Most of the participants never met the deceased in person. Others who are not engaged in virtual communities often cannot comprehend the importance of online relationships and the severity of such losses, which leads to disenfranchised grief. Generally not being able to share their grief offline with friends and family, Hensley’s respondents described several mourning practices that they performed online in order to share and express their grief including ‘online memorial services, in-game rituals such as an online funeral pyre, or just informal online gatherings for people to share memories of the deceased and express their grief.’²¹

Similarly, in other cases of disenfranchised grief, those suffering often find an attentive space for mourning in online support groups (see for example Feigelman et al. for cases of suicide,²² and Marton, Kilbane and Nelson-Becker for cases of animal loss²³). The internet also seems able to empower and give voice to marginalised grievers by facilitating communities of mourning made of individuals who come from various backgrounds and cultures but share commonalities in their mourning processes and needs.²⁴ According to Candi K. Cann, ‘it is a sort of liminal experience of community — perhaps not deeply meaningful, but an attempt nonetheless. One feels, for a moment, that one is not alone in the world.’²⁵ Mourning practices for disenfranchised grief demonstrate once again the need of community support — however loose or tight these communities might be — when one is confronted by death.

However, it is worth mentioning that not all grievers feel the same way about the level and content of sharing grief and memories online. Even though communities of mourning can be a safe haven for some grievers, society’s norms and taboos still penetrate and influence these digital spaces. For example, Dorthe R. Christensen at al. examined bereaved parent’s online grief communities to find out that certain photographs — for example, a close-up portrait of a dead child — can still split the community into those who find sharing such images acceptable and those who do not.²⁶ Interestingly, photographs of dead children in the arms of their parents or with a hand by a sibling touching the dead child were more acceptable to the online community; perhaps because such photographs demonstrate a relationship with the living.²⁷ This is a reminder that online communities of mourning might be more open and inclusive but certain societal norms might still persist and thereby influence what is shared and what is not. The articles in this special issue provide insights into how online communities of mourning function and demonstrate how societal norms can be challenged.

Photography, death, and mourning

Photography plays an important role in online memorials, such as memorialised social media accounts, and within communities of mourning. Everyday photographs of the deceased are publicly or semi-publicly shared and commented on. These photographs, which usually represent happy moments, are transformed into representations of absence, reminders of mortality, and at the same time, recall vibrant memories. According to Racheal Harris, a photograph of the deceased represents: ‘the triple narrative of a relationship lived and living (one which continues beyond the mortality of one party), as a historical proof of life (this person did live), and as a tangible locus of absence (this person in no longer).’²⁸ The likeness of a person in a photograph can be painful for mourners, can be reassuring, or can be both at the same time.

An act of mourning when looking at a photograph produced one of the most renowned books in the field of photography, and one referenced by several contributors in this special issue: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Even though Camera Lucida is described as ‘the most quoted book in the photographic canon,’²⁹ it is, at its heart, about mourning and everyday photography. The day after Barthes’s mother, Henriette Binger (1893 – 1977), died, Barthes began writing a diary of mourning.³⁰ For two years, Barthes wrote about the slow process of mourning, and in his diary entries we find the seeds of some of the main concepts in Camera Lucida.³¹ In both books, the Mourning Diary and Camera Lucida, Barthes described the search for his mother among old photographs. He discovered her true likeness in a photograph from 1898, when she was five years old, standing in a winter garden. In this photograph, Barthes found his ‘punctum,’ which he described as ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’³² He kept a reproduction of this photograph in front of him while he wrote his mourning diary.³³ We can imagine Barthes picking up and looking at individual printed photographs in a box or an album. He probably found portraits or happy photographs of christenings, birthdays, weddings and other milestones in his mother’s life.³⁴

Interestingly, Barthes, chose not to reproduce the photograph of his mother and argued that: ‘It exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but an indifferent picture, one of the thousand manifestations of the “ordinary” … but in it, for you, no wound.’³⁵ His grief was his own and he felt that by sharing this seemingly ordinary photograph, he couldn’t share his ‘wound.’ But one must wonder: if Barthes was living today, and he was on social media, would he have shared his mother’s photograph? It is nowadays common to announce the death of a loved one on social media or in messaging apps, with a few words and a photograph showing the deceased alive. For this death announcement, the bereaved still must go through the same process as Barthes did; the process of searching for the best representation of the deceased in analogue or digital photographs. This subjectively selected photograph announces that someone is in mourning, becomes the public manifestation of one’s ‘wound,’ commemorates the dead, and urges friends to provide their support, online and offline.

Barthes was not wrong when he said that the image of his mother would have blended in with the thousands (billions today) of manifestations of the ordinary. But perhaps this is the most crucial point: sharing photographs of the deceased online — such as selfies of the deceased, happy moments of everyday life, highlights of a biography, or pictures of the grave — makes death more visible and a part of the everyday. Digital technologies and networks can potentially bring back death to the everyday; and photographs of the dead (taken when alive or post-mortem) play a key role in this process.

Introduction of special issue articles

In the following sections, ‘Digital everyday photographs and mourning’ and ‘Contemporary post-mortem photographs and mourning,’ we briefly introduce the articles belonging to this special issue.

Digital everyday photographs and mourning

In his book titled ‘Ubiquitous Photography,’ Martin Hand told the story of mass photography, which began with the Kodak camera in 1888, and continued with the famous Brownie in 1900.³⁶ However, he argued that only since the 1990s:

Digital images have become ubiquitous aspects of daily life in advanced capitalist societies. The rise of digital photography as an ordinary practice has transformed the landscape of visual communication and culture: events, activities, moments, objects and people are ‘captured’ and distributed as images on an unprecedented scale.³⁷

He noted that photography has become an ordinary way for people to communicate and stay in touch in daily life. The photographic documentation of personal everyday life has never been as comprehensive and rich in detail as it is today. With mobile phones, not only cameras are at our fingertips capturing live moments, but also countless photographs of loved ones who may have passed away. With the photographic recording of everyday life, also remembrance and mourning have increasingly become photographic. Even headstones are being decorated with photographs or engravings of everyday photographs of the deceased.³⁸

In the first article of the special issue, ‘Digital Photographic Legacies, Mourning, and Remembrance: Looking Through the Eyes of the Deceased,’ Lorenz Widmaier focuses on how digital photographic legacies influence mourning and remembrance. Widmaier conducted interviews with bereaved people and demonstrates the ways digital photographs help mourners reconnect with the deceased, experience once again the shared life and/or missed periods in the life of the deceased, and thus balance emotions of grief. Curiously, mourners find value and comfort not only in photographs of happy or calm moments, but also in photographs depicting illness or suffering. For example, parents who lost a child to suicide find traces of their child’s emotional state, and thus answers to pressing questions, in the photographs left behind.

The intersection of everyday photography and digital technology can also be found in more traditional places of mourning, such as the cemetery. With the globalization of stone markets and inexpensive, on-demand laser engraving, photographs of the dead are increasingly appearing on headstones. However, the waning of tradition and mourning rituals, in combination with technological advances, sometimes results in gravestone images that are considered inappropriate for the cemetery setting. Samuel Holleran’s article ‘Cheeky Monuments: Photo-Engraved Headstones and Image Moderation in Cemeteries,’ examines controversial headstone imagery by looking into the ‘deathcare’ industry. He provides a detailed analysis of how novel technologies are influencing cemetery imagery and traces the reception of controversial headstones in cemeteries in Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom through an analysis of news articles and social media posts.

The next article, ‘Mourning with Strangers: Marc Adelman’s Stelen,’ by Sally Miller, also explores controversial images. Miller examines Adelman’s ‘Stelen,’ an artwork consisting of a collection of 150 found images of presumably queer men posing at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Germany to attempt to answer questions related to why an individual would pose in front of such a memorial and use the resulting photograph as a profile image on a gay dating site. Within a discussion of changing functions of public memorials, the institutional turn towards participatory memory practices, and sharing dark selfies on social media, Miller argues that Stelen becomes a counter-archive in which strangers articulate a history of marginalized loss and grief.

One of the articles that was selected for this special issue but appeared in the previous issue of photographies, is Sebastian Bustamante-Brauning’s (2022) article ‘[Re]-Appearances Online: Photography, Mourning and New Media Ecologies for Representing the Southern Cone’s Disappeared on Two Digital Memory Platforms.’ This article is another example of everyday photographs that become simultaneously both essential for public mourning and profoundly political. Bustamante-Brauning focuses on photographs that represent those forcibly disappeared during the dictatorships in Chile and Argentina. He analyses two human-rights focused websites that reproduce photographs of the disappeared and facilitate online memorial practices. He argues that the websites function as a virtual tombstone, allowing the families who have no physical grave to mourn the disappeared online. Furthermore, the websites, as digital archives of the disappeared, enable collective remembrance and demand political action.

Contemporary post-mortem photographs and mourning

Although we are flooded with images of mostly violent deaths in the media, such as photojournalistic images or deaths in amateur war coverage on YouTube, our exposure to photographs depicting ‘good deaths’ — that is death that comes from ‘natural causes at an appropriate time’³⁹ — is limited. Inhabitants of today’s Western societies have increasingly less physical and visual contact with the dead body than in pre-modern times. This may result in feelings of unease and awkwardness when confronted with a dead body or a photograph of a corpse. Indeed, it has been argued that in modern, Western societies ‘death had superseded sex as a taboo subject.’⁴⁰ Moreover, the family album usually excludes post-mortem photographs of the deceased or their funerals, perhaps due to general social conventions stipulating that a family album should tell stories of happiness and togetherness.⁴¹

However, one exception to this rule, that takes place in some hospitals and countries, is the photographing of stillborn infants.⁴² There are signs that with the spread of smartphones and due to the habit of photographically documenting one’s biographical moments, post-mortem photography is tentatively returning. Helen Ennis attributes this return of post-mortem photography primarily to the quickness and secrecy with which digital photographs can be taken.⁴³ Even though she observes that post-mortem photography is becoming more common, Ennis claims that this does not result in these photographs becoming more publicly visible. Having said that, some evidence can be found of post-mortem photographs being posted on social media, as Cherine Fahd shows in her article in this special issue.

Despite the relative absence of post-mortem photographs in family albums today, in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it was not uncommon to create port-mortem portraits of loved ones, especially of children. Deceased children were photographed in peaceful poses, as if sleeping, in their mother’s arms, in armchairs, or in their cots.⁴⁴ These photographs were often the only visual representation of an individual’s life and were used by the bereaved to grieve and remember.

Today, post-mortem photographs of 19^th and early 20^th centuries have found a new life on Etsy and other selling platforms as digitally reproduced curiosities or emotional relics of the past. Michele White’s article ‘Feeling Post-mortem Photography: Etsy Sellers’ Mourning Listings’ examines how sellers of vintage post-mortem photography try to recharge the photographs with emotion to create affective experiences of mourning. White studied thousands of listings on Etsy to find out that sellers use contextualizing practices, such as adding evocative titles and framing descriptions or adding textured backgrounds or props like dried flowers, to elicit emotions and magnify their memorial aspect.

The next article deals with how digital photography is impacting today’s post-mortem photography. Cherine Fahd’s article ‘Destigmatising Infant Loss with Photography and Hashtags on Instagram’ examines the evolving mourning practices of making and sharing photographs of infant loss. Fahd analysed Instagram posts to understand how and why mothers use photographs, captions, and hashtags, to mourn publicly. Due to technological advances, the photographs Fahd explores are much more vivid and intimate than most post-mortem images of children in the 19^th and early 20^th century. For viewers who did not expect to see such photographs, they may even be shocking. The social movement, which is both personal and political, aims to remember the children, build death literacy, and raise awareness of infant loss. The photographs introduce the infants as someone who has lived, makes them ‘real’ and thus grievable. Further, the mothers connect with others who might have gone through similar experiences and create an online community of mourning. The photographs show a specific baby, a specific mother in mourning, and they are highly personal.

In contrast, Purbita Das and Antara Chatterjee present an opposing point of view in ‘(Re)thinking Suffering and Mourning through COVID-19 Photographs in India,’ by arguing that images of mass death can be impersonal, unreal, and invisible. The authors offer a visual analysis of selected photographs of mass cremations and funerals, and of corpses floating in the river Ganges, that were taken during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India and widely circulated through online news and social media. Das and Chatterjee argue that these images of mass death depersonalize grief, dehumanize the body, and distance the viewer from feelings of pain, empathy, and mourning. Viewers do not recognise the deaths as grievable. Instead, the photographs evoke shock, horror, and fascination, and become documentations of a national emergency that sparks discussions about political failure.

Discussion

Thanatological literature argues that most modern Western societies have either adapted or lost touch with pre-modern mourning rituals and their connection with the dead body. Today, digital technologies have the potential to alter mourning practices by providing opportunities for acknowledging death, honouring and maintaining relationships with the dead, and offering alternative spaces where communities of mourning can gather; especially those that deal with disenfranchised grief. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that digital technologies and photography give rise to new everyday mourning practices and bring mourning ordinary deaths into the public eye. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic caused not only many deaths, but contributed to a new awareness of death and mourning in our society, and also forced many worldwide to use digital technologies for funeral ceremonies⁴⁵ and to provide emotional support to the bereaved.⁴⁶

Some authors of this special issue refer to novel practices used for mourning that contribute to an informed coping with grief. Widmaier outlines a range of grieving strategies of bereaved persons confronted with a digital photographic legacy and points to the opportunities for mourning and remembrance that arise and how grief can be alleviated in a dialogue with these both intimate and ordinary photographs. While Widmaier examines how technology influences what photographic legacies are inherited and how they are used for mourning, Holleran provides a detailed analysis on how new technologies, such as photo-engraving, influence cemetery imagery and facilitate the creation of larger and more playful headstones. But perhaps one of the most pathbreaking mourning practices facilitated by digital and online technologies is the creation and maintenance of online ‘mourning communities’ that are united by specific types of loss.

Individual needs in mourning often lead to specific mourning communities, especially online, in which like-minded mourners can come together with minimal spatial, temporal, or social boundaries. The idea of communities of mourning, inducing empathy and therapeutic effects, emerges strongly in several articles. Fahd describes how mothers who experience stillbirths and share photographs of their deceased babies are receiving support from friends and other women with similar experiences. Similarly, Bustamante-Brauning, who examines two websites that gather photographs of the enforced disappeared, argues that the websites function as virtual tombstones, allowing the families who have no physical grave, to come together to jointly mourn. In both cases the community of mourning uses photography to share and communicate their loss which was previously unacknowledged and hidden.

Despite a perceived freedom of expression online, online mourning practices are definitely not free from social conventions, individual attitudes about death, and cultural and socio-economic characteristics. What is acceptable to photographically portray in relation to death is often at the heart of many debates. Holleran’s article illustrates how today individually designed gravestones with controversial photographs and texts test, expand, and sometimes transgress the boundaries of accepted expressions of mourning in cemeteries. Fahd’s article highlights the controversy around sharing personal photographs of stillbirths and analyses the motivations of the women who shared them. White’s article about listings of digitally reproduced historical post-mortem photographs on Etsy, argues that normative ideas of who is grievable also persist online and that individual grief may remain oppressed.

Mourning cultures and practices are not only socially conditioned, but they can also be highly political. Which ordinary deaths are visible, and which are not, is not only a personal decision, but also a political one. Three articles examine the politicization of digital photography for mourning. Fahd demonstrates how publishing photographs of individual experiences of disenfranchised grief can become profoundly political. She mentions that ‘the invisibility of grief is undoubtedly the hardest to bear’⁴⁷ and argues that digital technologies allow the recognition, visibility, and de-stigmatisation of a very real loss. Miller’s article addresses grief which has so far scarcely received public attention. Through examining Adelman’s artwork, Miller argues that the collection of images taken at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and found on gay dating websites is a manifestation of a mourning for queer loss during the Holocaust and during the history of AIDS. The photographs serve a political purpose by articulating a history of marginalized loss and grief. Finally, Bustamante-Brauning’s article shows how a social movement publishing online photographs of enforced disappeared during dictatorships in Chile and Argentina, not only reclaims the right to mourn but also encourages collective memory, insists on accountability, and demands political action. Thus, individual photographs of the dead shared by the bereaved can broach the individual to the collective context to demand visibility, accountability, and action.

Nevertheless, the increase in posting death-related photographs does not necessarily lead to a greater awareness and sensitivity to grief. Photographs of death in media coverage abound. Most photojournalistic images de-personalize the victims and transform death into a spectacle. As a result, often viewers become distant, passive voyeurs of death who are incapable of empathetic responses.⁴⁸ Das and Chatterjee’s article makes this exact point when examining photographs of mass cremations and funerals and of corpses floating in the river, taken during the COVID-19 pandemic. They observe that dispassionate spectators do not recognise the deaths as grievable, but instead consume them as a spectacle. The visible violence in the images discourages mourning and consequently identification and solidarity with the victims. Therefore, not all images of death have the same effect on the viewers. Arguably, a focus on specific, named individuals and their specific circumstances of death, portrayed in a respectful and intimate way, can elicit sympathetic responses and aid mourning practices.

Conclusion

In an age when people live longer and infant mortality has been dramatically reduced, our first-hand encounters with the dead have diminished. With the proliferation of digital technologies, mourning has once again gained momentum and death re-entered everyday life, in particular through digital photographs shared online. But we must keep in mind that photographs of the dead do not exist for the dead; they only exist for the living. And for those who feel the loss, photographs of the dead can be both painful and comforting. The articles in this special issue demonstrate that digital everyday photographs can serve multiple functions: they can keep the memory of the deceased, allow the bereaved to reconnect with the deceased, make disenfranchised or marginalized grief visible, call for political action, build death literacy, evoke horror and fascination, and serve as a memento mori of our own death. The articles further substantiate that online mourning practices function within societal conventions and a political milieu. Nevertheless, digital technologies have the power to challenge the boundaries of societal conventions related to mourning practices and to place specific political claims related to visibility and justice at the forefront of societal dialogue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 764859. It was also supported by the Cyprus University of Technology and the CYENS Centre of Excellence.

Notes on contributors

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is associate professor at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology and the leader of the “Museum Lab” group at CYENS Centre of Excellence. Her research and artistic interests include photography, museum studies, new technologies and visual sociology. She received her PhD in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester (UK) and is the recipient of several scholarships and awards including a Smithsonian Fellowship in Museum Practice (USA), a Fulbright Fellowship (USA) and an Arts and Humanities Research Council Award (UK). Theopisti has published widely on photography and museums and has exhibited her artwork in Cyprus and abroad.

Lorenz Widmaier

Lorenz Widmaier is a PhD student in the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology. He holds a research fellowship from the European Training Network H2020 POEM, which researches participatory memory practices. He attained an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths College (UK) and a BA in Communication & Cultural Management from Zeppelin Universität (Germany). His research interests include thanatology, visual sociology, digital media, and photography.

Notes

1. Barthes, Camera Lucida; Harris, Photography and Death; and Sontag, On photography.

2. Gudmundsdottir and Chesla, “Building a New World;” and Hidalgo et al., “Practices Following the Death.”

3. Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death.

4. Christensen et al., “‘Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief,” 59.

5. Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, Continuing Bonds.

6. Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change;” and Walter, “New Mourners, Old Mourners.”

7. Walter, “New Mourners, Old Mourners.”

8. Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change.”

9. See, for instance, two major exhibitions on death and photography: “The dead” at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, UK, 1995/1996; and “The Last Image” at C/O Berlin, Germany, 2018/2019.

10. Harris, Photography and Death; and Fong, The Death Café Movement.

11. Hidalgo et al., “Practices Following the Death.”

12. Arnold et al., Death and Digital Media.

13. Bassett, The Creation and Inheritance, Cann, Virtual Afterlives; and Kasket, “Social Media Digital Afterlife.”

14. Vries and Rutherford, “Memorializing Loved Ones.”

15. Cann, Virtual Afterlives.

16. Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish, “Beyond the Grave.”

17. Arnold et al., Death and Digital Media, 6.

18. Doka, “Disenfranchised Grief,” 37.

19. Doka, Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions; and Hensley, “Bereavement in Online Communities.”

20. Hensley, “Bereavement in Online Communities.”

21. Ibid., 128.

22. Feigelman et al., Devastating Losses.

23. Marton, Kilbane, and Nelson-Becker, “Grief of Animal Care.”

24. Bassett, The Creation and Inheritance; Cann, Virtual Afterlives; Doka, Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions; Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change;” and Sofka, “Social Support Internetworks.”

25. Cann, Virtual Afterlives, 140.

26. Christensen at al., “‘Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief.”

27. Ibid.

28. Harris, Photography and Death, 22.

29. Batchen, “Palinode,” 3.

30. Barthes, Mourning Diary.

31. Badmington, “Punctum Saliens.”

32. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 27.

33. Badmington, “Punctum Saliens.”

34. Rose, Doing Family Photography.

35. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 73.

36. Hand, Ubiquitous Photography.

37. Ibid., 1.

38. Benkel and Meitzler, “Sterbende Blicke, lebende Bilder.”

39. Arnold et al., Death and Digital Media.

40. Gorer, Death, Grief, and Mourning, 9.

41. Fahd, “Difficult Images.”

42. Blood and Cacciatore, “Parental Grief and Memento Mori Photography: Narrative, Meaning, Culture, and Context;” and Ruby, Secure the Shadow.

43. Ennis, “Death and Digital Photography.”

44. Gihon, “Post-Mortem Photography;” Harris, Photography and Death; and White, in this issue.

45. MacNeil et al., “Use of Virtual Funerals;” and Enari and William, “Digital Innovation and Funeral.”

46. Hamid and Jahangir, “Mourning Amid COVID-19 Pandemic.”

47. Fahd, in this issue.

48. Stylianou and Stylianou-Lambert, Museums and Photography.