After my grandmother passed away, my cousins and I spent a day sorting through old family photos to find the best ones to display at her wake. Amidst the familiar faces of aunts and uncles, we found a stack of worn pictures that had been mailed to my great-grandparents by their relatives in Germany and Poland decades ago.And there, in the middle of that stack, we found something that took us a moment to comprehend. The photo was of a man, balding with a sharp goatee, lying on his back with his eyes closed and his hands crossed on his stomach. The flower arrangements around him quickly revealed the truth – the photograph was of a corpse.

For modern Americans like my cousins and me, death is something of a cultural taboo, but it wasn’t always that way. Prior to photography, making a cast of a dead loved one’s face or hands was extremely commonplace as a way of remembering that person. Visit the National Archeological Museum in Athens, and you can see the 3,500-year-old “Mask of Agamemnon,” a gold representation of the deceased that was placed over his face when he was buried. In the millennia prior to modern medicine and penicillin, death was common and a visible fact of everyday life, so people didn’t shy away from it as much as we do now. During the middle ages, families would often even keep a memento mori -- an image, often utilizing symbolic imagery such as the grim reaper and dwindling hour glasses -- that served as an aid in remembering the death of a loved one…and the inevitable death of those left behind.

With the emergence of early photographic imagery, before people had numerous photos to commemorate the minutia of everyday life, only key events were documented, and death was considered one of those key events. In fact, most of the very earliest photographs ever captured were of the departed of the American Civil War. During the Victorian era, relatives would often pose or prop up a deceased loved one to make them appear alive. As strange as it sounds today, it also wasn’t uncommon for photographers to paint open eyes on the dead. It may sound creepy to us, and with good reason: it demonstrates a comfort level with death – and more particularly with the dead – that astounds most of us today. Sure, when my cousins and I stumbled upon that nameless goateed relative, we were more than a little freaked out, and it’s difficult to imagine that even my great-grandparents really wanted to receive those pictures. But if we were citizens of the 19th century, we’d be considered unfeeling if we didn’t want to honor and remember the passing of the recently departed by hiring someone to photograph his body.

Today, despite the relative user-friendliness of photography, we still entrust the responsibility of capturing important family milestones – Bar Mitzvahs, first Communions, Quinceañeras, high school graduations – to the capable and proven hands of a professional. We feel the need to formally and professionally document every moment considered to be socially profound, as if others or we ourselves will otherwise forget or, worse yet, remember incorrectly. Just over 100 years ago, death was treated in the same way. In the early years of photography, people were comfortable allowing a national progression of formal images to record the natural progression of life – people were born, they married, and they died; why sanitize that fact by hiding a key life event?

My Eastern European relatives photographing the mysterious, now unknown man were essentially doing what my cousins and I were doing that day as we sorted through albums: celebrating the full scope of our loved one’s life in the way that felt best to us. While we used images in different ways, we had the same goal and the same sincere affection for the person we lost. The comforting power of images is strong and can be a wonderful way to remember those who’ve gone before us. If a large portrait of a lost loved one feels too personal, too raw for a deep loss, a custom oil painting of a shared, secret place – a favorite vacation spot or an often-visited park – can bring peace and solace, allowing the viewer a way to remember the good times with the now deceased. That emotional release is a unique power of visual art, and it’s the pursuit of that comfort that has led people to capture images of the dead – through death masks, then post-mortem photography, and now our modern photo displays at funeral homes. We might use different media, but ultimately, we’ve all found imagery to be the best way to express our love and our grief.