Digital Commons Network^™

Photography And Mourning: Excavating Memories Of My Great-Grandmother, Eva Weiner

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores how photographs have affected mourning processes in the past and how photo-technology may be able to change the way in which we mourn in the future. It includes an overview of the history of post-mortem photography and discusses the perspectives of well-known media theorists such as Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. It engages with psychologists by including their perspectives on the effect that photographs have on the mourning process. A project was created to investigate how photo-technology can affect the bereaved. The project places photographs of a mother into pictures of her children taken after she had …