An Ode to Funeral Photography

To photograph a funeral is to steal from time,
to crystallize the ephemeral wound of loss.
The shutter clicks,
an intrusion, an elegy—
a record of pain held still,
as if the frozen grief might console
or scandalize.

Here, the camera is a double agent:
it memorializes and betrays.
What is private, now rendered public,
the mourner’s tears turned into artifacts.
Are they sacred, these images?
Or are they theft?

Photography loves what is fleeting.
The bereaved, caught unaware,
become subjects—no longer selves.
The body lying in repose:
a paradox of presence and absence,
forever both there and not there.

And yet, these images endure.
In them, grief finds permanence,
a defiance of oblivion.
They are tools of remembrance,
but also of voyeurism.
The viewer is complicit,
their gaze heavy with unearned intimacy.

Still, perhaps in this theft,
there is a kind of grace.
The funeral photograph declares:
This moment mattered.
The living will forget;
the camera does not.

But beware the seduction of such permanence.
The photograph cannot restore
the warmth of the hand that is gone,
nor the sound of the voice now silenced.
It gives us only the echo,
the shadow, the absence
dressed as presence.

To photograph a funeral, then,
is to court the impossible.
To honor what cannot be preserved.
To grasp, through the lens,
at the fading outline of our own mortality.