The cultures of grief: The practice of post-mortem photography and iconic internalized voices

Abstract

I develop an exploratory analysis of “post-mortem photography”, a social practice existing in different cultures. The study, part of a larger project in Denmark, “The culture of grief”, combines Dialogical Self Theory, mainly concerning verbal and textual objects, with the iconic framework of affective semiosis to discuss the function of taking and keeping pictures of dead persons as if they were still alive or just sleeping. How can this practice and artifact culturally mediate the experience of death and the elaboration of grief? What kind of inner dialogue is developed through the internalization of this specific kind of presence/absence? These are some of the preliminary questions I will try to answer by discussing some examples of post-mortem photography from the 19th and 20th centuries in different countries.

Cultural mediation of grief: the role of aesthetic experience

“…Such social channeling is primarily experienced aesthetically (Tateo, 2018b), through a holistic felling into the situation. Culture provides suggestions, models, and atmospheres about how grief "ought" to be experienced that the person selectively internalized and then used to express grief (Tateo, 2018a). Expressing a selective form of suggested conduct (e.g., dressing in black, mourning, being on one's own) affects the personal experience of grief (Figure 1).…”

“…The socially guided affective logic (Tateo, 2018b) allows to manage the inherent contradictions of the loss, through the mediation of internalized cultural artifacts (rituals, photographs, dresses, etc.) (Tateo, 2018a). In terms of affective logic, the two statements: "I am grieving therefore I am wearing black"; and "I am wearing black therefore I am grieving" are equally valid.…”

“…Grief is a developmental and holistic process, involving several complex, ambivalent, and cyclical emotions, whose meaning is elaborated through selectively internalized social suggestions. The concept of affective logic (Tateo, 2018a(Tateo, , 2018b can provide a useful theoretical model to understand the relationship between the living and the dead as a systemic cultural organization and to describe the personal synthesis of cultural guidance, through processes of internalization/ externalization (De Luca Picione, 2020).…”

Thanatos Revised: What Psychology May Look Like with Positive, Enduring Attitudes Towards Death and Dying

“…Questioning the singularity of death has become an urgent issue in contemporary society due to the progressive modification of our public funerary rituals and-more generally-in the privatization of a social event like death (Fonseca & Testoni, 2012;Tateo, 2018). A historical transformation has turned such disruptive experience in an intimate reconstruction of values and in a silent clinical symptom.…”

Grief, photography and meaning making: A psychological constructivist approach

“…Images, such as pictures of our loved ones – including post-mortem photographs (Blood & Cacciatore, 2014; Tateo, 2018) – are also tools that culturally mediate the experience of death and the elaboration of grief by stimulating conversations and reminiscences about the dead, thus contributing to meaning-making and the maintenance of a personal and social bond with the deceased (Riches & Dawson, 1998). In the process of recounting, sharing and negotiating our grief experience, the use of photographs can contribute to the meaning-making effort by providing contextual richness in triggering individuals’ unique memories and working through them by visual storytelling (Kim, 2016).…”