Photography in Times of Grief

On the power to preserve moments both great and terrible

Two weeks ago I was standing in my parents’ kitchen when a family friend arrived for an unexpected visit. My mother opened the door and delivered shocking news: “Gene died Tuesday.” It was blunt and unvarnished, the well-meaning welcome of someone still reeling.

That is how I feel today, telling you that my father has passed away. It happened quickly, but we were fortunate to surround him with love in the final days of his life.

Throughout my own life, anytime anything notable happens I take pictures. This is typical for lots of us, photographers and civilians alike. Our phones and family albums are filled with photos of vacations and birthdays, barbecues and bike rides, holidays and weddings. It’s most often happy occasions, events we want to commemorate in an effort to someday remember more accurately. But as I sat with my father, gray winter light flooding hospital windows, I wondered if this was a scene I should photograph too.

This would happen a few more times over the next 24 hours, and each time it occurred to me to consider documenting the end of my father’s life I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it. I don’t necessarily think that I should have, but muddled thinking in those moments meant that I genuinely was unsure if this would be the kind of thing I might want to commemorate in photographs. 

It helped to know that my father would not want to be photographed in such a compromised position. Even if I had wanted to, I certainly would have deferred to what I knew his wishes to be. Regardless, I didn’t want to. And yet I would still periodically see photographs in the room and wonder if I should.

I wondered not only for the photographer in me but also for the son. Would this be something that could eventually provide comfort to me and my family? These photographs would have been nothing if not intimate and important. But necessary? I don’t think so. At least not for me. 

Several images from those days are seared into my memory, and I envision them now as I write this. With any luck my brain will over time refine them into something less intense and more palatable. Turn them into memories, in other words, with all their faults and inaccuracies. 

I wonder, though, why was I compelled to capture these moments of grief? 

Was it a simple act of distancing myself from the situation? The camera as shield, putting a momentary barrier between myself and an awful reality? The consequence of fixing the scene in pixels seemed even more awful, creating a totem to make the pain perpetual.

My impulse might have simply been a reflex. As a photographer I raise my camera when something important is happening. I may not think about it until later, but in the moment I just know I make pictures. 

Susan Sontag wrote that photographs alter our ideas about what is worth seeing, and what we have a right to observe. “The most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads… To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and, therefore, like power.” 

Maybe I just wanted a sense of power in this most powerless of moments, to photograph my dad one more time, to hold him in my head alive forever. 

Photography permits us to fix a specific moment in time and aid us in returning to it ad infinitum. Coming back to this moment would allow me to see my father alive, yes, but it would also necessitate revisiting my own trauma. 

Traumatic photographs have their place, of course. Photojournalists documenting the infinite human struggle, artists making intimate images that reveal deep personal truths. Photographs, even difficult ones, are capable of providing connection and comfort. 

The aftermath of my own experience has included guilt, as a son who might have been perceived as exploiting my father’s circumstance, and as a photographer who didn’t have the stones to make pictures when things got real. I don’t regret my choice, mostly, but I do think there is much to be said for the photographers who pick up cameras during such difficult times. They are stronger than I am, for sure. 

Nancy Borowick turned her camera toward her family, documenting her parents’ simultaneous struggles with stage-four cancer treatment. Her photographs in The Family Imprint are as intimate and real as any I’ve seen. James Friedman documented the loss of his mother in the project 1,029,398 Cigarettes, which began as a way to encourage smokers to seek treatment and conquer their addictions. He says his project brought them closer at the end of her life. “The photographs taken during her final illness were, I think, my mother’s last gift to me.”

One of the most profound series of photographs about death and dying was made by Nicholas Nixon, who photographed AIDS patients in the 1980s. At a time when the public was not yet taking the health crisis seriously because the disease primarily affected gay men, Nixon followed 15 men through the end of their lives. His project, People With AIDS, put a human face on the epidemic, influenced public perception and spurred change among government entities and healthcare companies. The images are heartbreaking and intense, and the men who agreed to be photographed were incredibly brave—as is the photographer who no doubt suffered in their making. 

In the minutes after my father’s passing, I continued to wonder if I should pick up a camera. I chose to photograph a few things that seemed less gut wrenching but still important. There was the notepad on which my mother had written only the date. There was the clock I had stared at high in the corner of the room. And there was my first step outside the building as I emerged into a world that for the first time did not include my father. 

The next day I sat in his favorite chair. I photographed his shoes by the door where he’d left them. I photographed his book on the table where he’d placed it. I photographed the things he had touched, and in so doing can retain them, and him, there forever. These images are artifacts of my father and the marks he left on this world, not the incomplete or inaccurate version of him in his final hours.

These images were not made for sharing. They are a part of my own personal record should I choose to revisit the moments surrounding my father’s death without transporting me directly to the terrible heart of the matter. I don’t know when or if I will want to look at them, but knowing I have them helps me to feel grounded at a time when not much else does.

Standing in a frame shop 48 hours later, searching for the perfect display for my father’s memorial portrait, it struck me how plainly important photographs become when a loved one departs. In the coming days friends and family would share pictures of my father over the decades, and we pored over hundreds of snapshots as we created his memorial slideshow. It’s a practical endeavor, but in the process I was regularly transported to that barbecue, to that fishing trip, to that time we were celebrating one thing or another. 

No other objects have quite the same capability. These once disposable photographs are now valuable beyond measure. 

It strikes me that the act of photographing is a forward-looking endeavor, fundamentally benevolent, undertaken for the benefit of our future selves. It is in that way inherently optimistic.

I’m glad there are photographers such as Borowick, Friedman and Nixon who are strong and brave and willing to show us difficult moments. I salute them, and those like them, who are able to tap into the power of photography at such trying times. I don’t know if it’s soothing and helpful for them, but I hope so. I do know now how incredibly difficult it must have been to make those pictures. 

At his funeral and in his obituary was a portrait of my father. It was made two years ago, after lunch one day, when I asked him to sit for a light test. It was offhand and casual. I made five frames and selected the one that seemed most like him: wry smile, twinkle in his eye, a hint of formality. When all is said and done, I’m glad this is the photograph I will most associate with the end of his life. It is my father in full health, fully satisfied, after a nice lunch, alive and well and having a good time with his son.