Remembering the Dead: Laments and Photographs

The responsibility of remembering the dead was once commonly assigned to the performers of laments: wept songs that are still an indispensable part of the death rituals of many cultures. As traditional laments disappeared from large areas of the world and portrait photography developed, many of the same claims were made for the photograph as had been made for the lament, specifically, that it was a way to fix and shape the memory of the deceased. Enlarged, framed, garlanded, placed on tombs or in family albums, photographs were credited both with preserving and with stimulating memory. Both arts were believed to tell the "truth" about the dead, a truth believed by the members of a family or larger community. But there are important differences, not only in the form but in the substance of these memorial arts, and in cultures where laments and photographs coexist, photographs may act as a stimulus to lament but not as a substitute. The lament's "truth" is based on an aesthetic of pain, whereas the photograph's claim to truth is based on the means of its production. It is evidence of the tangibility of the subject that passed in front of a lens. Its very tangibility, however, makes the relationship between the photograph and memory problematic. Whereas the emotional tone, dialectic exchange, and musical qualities of a lament act as stimuli to memory, the photograph's static nature becomes a substitute for memory, its affect contingent on the associations the observer brings to it, associations that gradually lose their power to evoke the subject. The promise that photography seemed to hold out as preserver of individual and public memory has, as some observers are beginning to realize, not been fulfilled. Indeed, in contrast to the lament, the photograph has an ambiguous relationship to memory.

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In the preindustrial villages of Europe, Asia, and Africa, including the rural Greek villages of the first half of the twentieth century, the dead are or were remembered orally, through the sung poetry of lament. Laments played a central role in the elaborate rituals for the dead that included prayers, the preparation and distribution of ritual foods, the lighting of oil lamps, and the placing of flowers on the grave. Laments were a way to preserve the dead not only in individual but in communal memory, and they were believed to open a channel of communication with the other world. In recent decades photographs have also become an integral part of death rituals, being placed not only on the grave but in the church during the memorial services and on the trays of funeral food.¹ Among the flowers, food, candles, oil, and other objects placed on Greek graves, photographs are the focus of the visitor's attention, not only identifying the occupant of the grave or ossuary but, like the icons of the Greek Orthodox Church, providing an image that can be directly addressed, even kissed. The singing of laments, which was once the most important means of addressing the dead and summoning them back to "converse" with the living, is confined to the more remote villages of northern Greece, the southern Peloponnese, and certain islands, and to their elderly inhabitants. In those villages where laments are still sung, photographs may substitute for laments but coexist with them, sometimes prompting the mourner to sing.²

Some years ago a Greek friend of mine and I visited the town where her sister lived and where her mother had lived until her death the year before. After we had greeted her sister, my friend L. announced, "Now we're going to visit Kyria Margarita." I knew my friend had no other relatives in the town and wondered why we were making a visit to an acquaintance so soon after we had arrived. L. and I walked until we came to the cemetery where, to my surprise, she turned...