Photographs have long been central to processes of remembrance and memorialisation, helping us to navigate our way between grief as an intensely private and personal process, and mourning, as a more public and collective expression of loss. Today we live swamped with images, both of ourselves and of people who have died, and while this means that we have more images than ever to choose from, it also makes the selection and curation of images after a person’s death a more complicated task. The How We Mourn project explores both the cultural contours and therapeutic possibilities of this task, by charting the social life of particular photographs from the context in which they were taken, via their circulation through different sites in the digital sphere, and in physical places in the home.
