View Full Version : Will photos decorate your funeral, memorial, or wake?
Heroique
20-Apr-2012, 15:54
I’m curious if you’ll instruct your survivors to display LF photos at your funeral service or wake? The average age around here is 49 years, so this must have crossed your mind at least once.
Some people request songs be played – it would seem natural that people here would ask that certain prints be displayed. :)
If so, would they be your prints – or if images taken by others, which ones and why?
What would you want the image(s) to communicate?
How & where would you display them? Landscapes? Portraits?
Finally, anyone taking a print (or two) “with them”?
Old-N-Feeble
20-Apr-2012, 16:04
No. I'm going to be burnt and my ashes tossed to the wind. No funeral. :)
Kimberly Anderson
20-Apr-2012, 17:15
I'm doing the same as Old-N-Feeble, but at any kind of memorial service that might be held, I'll have my kids/wife put out a box of prints and let people take whatever they want.
I'm doing the same as Old-N-Feeble, but at any kind of memorial service that might be held, I'll have my kids/wife put out a box of prints and let people take whatever they want.
Are you going to sign them before you go?
Old-N-Feeble
20-Apr-2012, 17:45
<snip>I'll have my kids/wife put out a box of prints and let people take whatever they want.
Are you going to sign them before you go?
Only in carbon ink...
Heroique
20-Apr-2012, 19:27
…I’ll have my kids/wife put out a box of prints and let people take whatever they want.
That’s a great idea to soothe everyone’s sense of loss.
I’ve always considered displaying a favorite classic landscape from the deepest American Romanticist oil-on-canvas tradition – say Frederick Edwin Church or Thomas Cole. It would be a natural scene whose separate elements interact to communicate a grand, dynamic energy. A number of images by AA would capture that sort of spirit in a silver print. I might even be able to afford an original to show in that case.
This would also be my guiding principle when choosing a silver print of my own – either to display at the service, or make available for people to take home, like Michael.
Are you going to sign them before you go?
Yes, I’d sign my prints in advance to make them personal, as well as universal.
The prints would remind people, I hope, that I’m still around in a special sense.
Kimberly Anderson
20-Apr-2012, 20:20
That’s a great idea to soothe everyone’s sense of loss.
I like the idea of everyone's loss needing to be soothed upon my passing, but honestly I'm sure my wife would like to get the crap out of the house. If people's loss is soothed, well, all the better. There will be a few people dancing on my wind-strewn ashes I am sure (if they could find them...I'm being strewn in an awfully remote area...).
John Kasaian
20-Apr-2012, 20:27
Why?
Heroique
21-Apr-2012, 10:23
Why?
Is this a profound cry to the heavens about death, or a simple question for Michael about choosing a remote place for his ashes? ;^)
Kimberly Anderson
21-Apr-2012, 11:20
The 'why' and 'where' of my ashes being strewn in a remote location is so that those who attend the 'strewing occasion' will finally be compelled to go to the places I found myselb being drawn towards to both seek my own solitude and also create my photography. Usually no one knows what it's like where I go shoot...this would be a way for them to experience it at least once.
John Kasaian
21-Apr-2012, 17:27
Niether. Why associate your creative work with your death? Why be remembered by one more view of Half Dome? Your mourners may be grateful to see a photo of the decedent (if only to reassure them they aren't at the wrong funeral, like maybe the funeral of some one with the same name as yours, lol!)
Of course if you're a successful photographer it might help spike the prices for your heir's welfare. They could even sell prints out the back of the hearse "while the edition lasts"
John Kasaian
21-Apr-2012, 17:30
I used to be the biz of tossing "cremains" out of airplanes. There is a device fabricated out of the heavy cardboard tubing carpets came rolled up on to get the cremains out into the slipstream sos not to get sucked back into the low pressure cockpit. The device was called the "ash hole"
Yeah, lets not go there:rolleyes:
John Kasaian
21-Apr-2012, 17:57
I still can't stomach looking at a bowl of Grapenuts cereal.
My "mourners" will probably get envelopes containing cash since they'll be from "rent-a-crowd"...
Old-N-Feeble
21-Apr-2012, 18:01
Yeah, me too RickV. Old single pharts UNITE!!
Alan Gales
21-Apr-2012, 18:59
I don't plan on being there so I really don't care.
kurtdriver
22-Apr-2012, 18:00
I don't plan to attend, so I don't really have any feelings on the subject.
The average age around here is 49 years
In six weeks I become average, I was hoping to avoid that.
Dan Henderson
22-Apr-2012, 18:22
I never really thought about my pictures being part of my funeral. Now that I do think about it, I don't like the idea. My pictures are the expression of my life and I would rather not have them associated with my death.
I have expressed 2 wishes after I die: first, don't cremate me. It seems an ignominious end for a firefighter. Second, I want a Jimmy Buffett song played at my funeral that borrows lines from the a Mark Twain book: "be good and you will be lonesome/be lonesome and you will be free/live a lie and you will regret it/that's what living is to me, that's what living is to me."
Are you going to sign them before you go?
As opposed to what - signing them after you go? And will they be signed on the front, or in verso? Ink or pencil?
E. von Hoegh
23-Apr-2012, 07:51
I’m curious if you’ll instruct your survivors to display LF photos at your funeral service or wake? The average age around here is 49 years, so this must have crossed your mind at least once.
Some people request songs be played – it would seem natural that people here would ask that certain prints be displayed. :)
If so, would they be your prints – or if images taken by others, which ones and why?
What would you want the image(s) to communicate?
How & where would you display them? Landscapes? Portraits?
Finally, anyone taking a print (or two) “with them”?
I certainly hope not. My photos are very private, I display only two of them and rarely show the rest to anyone, and then only when asked.
Heroique, you certainly come up with some odd questions...
Also, I'd like to point out that age 49 is the average age of those who have given their ages. I'm above average... (winking smiley)
cjbecker
23-Apr-2012, 08:05
If images are the thing that people recognize me for when I die, my life was a failure.
rdenney
23-Apr-2012, 08:35
I frankly don't care. The funeral isn't for me--it's part of the process of those who care about me who are left behind. (I'm sticking with the assumption that the population of those who care about me is nonzero.) If showing my pictures helps them, then fine. If not, that's fine, too. Giving them away? Whatever. Selling them? Even better.
I hope there will be other things to talk about during the eulogy, and I hope those things are about the people doing the talking, but that won't be my choice.
I recently attended a funeral for the son of a friend. His son had died of lymphoma at age 21. Our friend's eulogy was a trip through a book he'd bought when his son was born--a father-son how-to--with a rule for fathers to apply to raising their sons on every page. He took us through the pages with advice he'd not followed, celebrating the way his son overcame his father's lapses. And then he took us through the pages with the advice he'd followed, celebrating the way his son humbled him even when he thought he was doing the right thing. Finally, he read to us the last page: "And finally, you must let him go." His final words, "I guess I've failed at that one, too." My wife reached for the box of Kleenex, but she had to get it away from me first. It was obviously deeply moving, but it was also for our friend, not for his son.
Funerals are for the living. Let them decide how to conduct them.
My only rule for my own funeral is: No open casket. Cremation--whatever. But the world does not need to see my dead body, however dolled up with wax and spray paint and fancy duds.
Rick "as I used to say in San Antonio, it don't make no le hace" Denney
Old-N-Feeble
23-Apr-2012, 09:11
Wow, Rick, a heart-breaking eulogy for sure. I think I'd be blubbering like a baby...
Heroique
23-Apr-2012, 10:52
...Heroique, you certainly come up with some odd questions...
I plead guilty – there’s nothing like contemplating one’s own death to enliven our thoughts about LF prints. As we know, all LF photographers must meet the same tragic end, so it’s interesting to hear how our prints might ennoble this fate w/ a bit of gleam, vision, and light…
Andrew O'Neill
23-Apr-2012, 11:01
A question that concerns me more is what should happen to all my prints and negs after I'm gone? Should I burn all my negs like Brett Weston did to save someone a lot of hassle? Or should I stick them all in a time capsule and bury them out the the back 40 to be found some day in the future?
E. von Hoegh
23-Apr-2012, 11:32
A question that concerns me more is what should happen to all my prints and negs after I'm gone? Should I burn all my negs like Brett Weston did to save someone a lot of hassle? Or should I stick them all in a time capsule and bury them out the the back 40 to be found some day in the future?
Make very clear provision in your will how you want them disposed. This goes for any material goods you value.
My prints have "decorated" a number of funerals and visitations--not my own, yet. One example: Ten years ago I did a photo project where I photographed my wife's grandparents. They had lived in the same house for 60 years, raised 7 children there. They moved to a retirement home and sold the house and held an auction for all house hold items. I photographed the town, the house and the grandparents. I gave sets of the prints to them and their children for Christmas one year (17 photos each). My wife's grandfather died two years after moving out of the house. I was surprised when I went to the funeral to find the entire set on display. The photo which got the most comments was a five generation photo--grandfather holding his great, great grandchild.
danno@cnwl.igs
2-May-2012, 08:17
As we know, all LF photographers must meet the same tragic end…
That does it ! I'm moving to Medium Format !
Brian C. Miller
2-May-2012, 09:13
As we know, all LF photographers must meet the same tragic end…
That does it ! I'm moving to Medium Format !
So you won't die from being crushed underneath a massive 60ft by 45ft "mine is ever so seriously bigger than yours" mega-ultra-giga-I-don't-have-a-life-large-format camera that you tried backpacking while climbing sheer mountain sides in an ice hurricane. And as you fall, you'll think, "Gee whiz, I should have listened to Brian and not brought 7,498 different lenses with me! All that glass and brass was so heavy..."
Enjoy your 8oz. Holga.
Me? I plan to die out in the woods so nobody knows if I'm photographing or selling prints by the side of the road. Immortality through quantum uncertainty.
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