Heads up, y'all. Today's episode is about death. So if that's not something you're interested in listening to right now, just come back to this episode later on.
Theme is a.
Production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. In twenty twenty two, rapper Markel Moreau, also known by his stage name Gunu, was killed in Maryland. He was just twenty four years old when he died, and his death was all over the news, not just because he was a rapper who was murdered, but because of what his family did with his body after he died. Markel Morrow's loved Ones hosted a viewing over the weekend at DC Nightclop and.
Now videos and pictures they're surfacing all over social media of Marrow's body being prominently displayed and then it.
So much about this whole debacle was shitty. The fact that Guna was killed, the fact that his family had to grieve his death while subjected to intense public scrutiny, the fact that all the Internet instigators were more concerned with his deceased body being staged than his life being so needlessly taken from him. It was yet another instance of the circumstances around a young black man's death being harshly and endlessly picked apart.
Yeah, I remember this. There are people commenting online that presenting Markel's body that way at a club was too much.
Now, I know that when you're putting a loved one to rest, there are often people in your ear trying to tell you how to do that best. But to have people who aren't in your family, don't live in your estate, were nowhere in around or near the deceased person's life, don't know you from Jack's squat, trying to tell you what you should and shouldn't have done, that seems tiring. It's clearly one not anyone's business, and two
what the family wanted. This is Markel's mother, Patrese Parker Moreau, speaking to Fox five Washington DC.
It's something that I wanted to do. That's how I want. Marchel wanted me to do it. That's how he wanted to go out. He wanted to celebrate his life, turning up having a party. He don't want people to be sad and crying. He always wants people to be happy, having fun.
I'm sure the family would have much rather not had a memorial service at all and instead saw Markel get older, make more music. I'm sure they didn't want to have to grieve, right.
Who would want to go through this? But as much as Americans like to be uptight about death and mourning, post mortem photography has a deep history that began long before the first negative Nancy logged onto a social media site. Death portraiture is an art that's been around for a long time, and it's still alive today. I'm Katie and I'm Eves. Today's episode the Last Image, Katie. Had you ever seen any funerary portraits before?
You know what? Not professional ones. But whenever me and my grandmother were at a funeral, she would try to make me take a picture of the person in the casket, and I would always yell at her as they no. She would always take pictures and you would be like at her house looking through photo albums and then boom, somebody casket and I'm like, girl, but maybe.
She was on some yeah.
Twenty first century American culture on the whole is one that seems to not want to touch death with a ten foot stick. There are exceptions, of course, but here in the US, funerals are sad occasions and morning is private and appropriate it's not socially acceptable to wear our grief on our sleeves for too long, and there are
respectable and unrespectable ways to mourn our loved ones. But you know, before all the anti aging creams and supplements, death was everywhere you turned, high infant mortality rates, war disease. I mean, I'm not saying we aren't still surrounded by death. It's just easier to live longer today in the US than it was in the mid eighteen hundreds, So death wasn't as touchy of a subject, and portraits of the dead were not uncommon.
You mean images of people after they had already died.
Yeah, when photography was still a young art form, a lot of people never got the chance to have their picture taken when they were alive, so their opportunity to be photographed came in death. This gave the surviving family members and friends a super special memento to hold on to, a cherished reminder of their life.
Wow, we can take photos to our hearts content these days, and those are our treasure to have when people pass away. So I can only imagine what it was like to have this new medium that can capture the image of a loved one exactly as they were.
Yeah, and back in the nineteenth century, photos of the day were put in family albums or displayed in the home. By the twentieth century, photography was more accessible, death care was more commercial, and post mortem photos weren't just for anyone's eyes. But people still took photos of and with dead people to honor their memory. It was less likely that these photos would be taken in a home setting, but photographers captured the deceased in their caskets alone or
surrounded by loved ones. And one such photographer was James Vanderz.
Oh yeah, I know, James.
Yeah.
You might have seen some of vander Z's photos before. He created some really beautiful studio portraits of black New Yorkers in the early nineteen hundreds. He also captured photographs that documented black life in Harlem at the.
Time, and that time was the Harlem Renaissance.
Yes, ma'am.
He started his photography business in the early nineteen hundreds in Harlem, but he really began to get attention after he was featured in the nineteen sixty nine exhibition Harlem On My Mind. He took portraits of noted artists like County Cullen and Ruby d He photographed Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association.
Seems like his subjects had a little coin or notoriety.
Well.
While post mortem portraits were restricted to the upper class back when they had to be painted, the emergence of photography made them a lot more accessible. The development of the technology was a boon to post mortem portraiture, and people with money, not just money money, could now get portraits. Some of those folks were the black folks that vander z photographed in New York.
A lot of the.
Families that commissioned him would have been considered middle class and weren't famous. And his work wasn't just about black life, it was also about black death. Along with artists and archivist Kamille Billips and poet Owen Dotson, James Vandersey created the Harlem Book of the Dead. In it, his funerary portraits were accompanied by Dotson's poems written from the dead's perspective,
and tech from interviews with Billips. A lot of the older post mortem photographs we see are of Europeans and white Americans, but this art form and mourning ritual is also part of a black tradition when we get back how The Harlem Book of the Dead memorialized James Vandersey's work as a funerary photographer with a co sign from
Tony Morrison. The Harlem Book of the Dead marked the first time the public saw all of James Vandersey's funerary portraits compiled, but it wasn't published until nineteen seventy eight, decades after he captured the photos, and millennia after its namesake, the Egyptian Book of the Dead was used. The book is divided into thematic sections, for instance, one about children, one about soldiers, and one about women. The deceased pictured
in the photos are children and adults. Sometimes vanderz has them whole props like a teddy bear or newspaper or flowers. Stories of how some of the people pictured died are included in the back of the book, And of course there are the poems that accompany the black and white photos in the book. Owen Dotson, a Black writer from Brooklyn, used his poetry to highlight the inevitability and grim reality of death, as well as the dignity and significance of
the lives that were lost. He says in one poem, death always happens to somebody else, not the dead. Somebody friends, somebody aunts, cousins, nephews, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, not the dead. As Kamil Billips notes in the introduction to the book, poetry and portraiture were old bedfellows with death, and vanderz was well aware of the old tradition that he was
a part of. When Billips asked him if he knew about the history of post mortem photography, he talked about people who painted portraits of the dead and about funerary photos he got from the West Indies that he copied and translated to his style.
What do you mean by his style.
Well, there were other artists, including black Ones, who photographed it dead, but Vanderzy's images were unique. The staging of the bodies and the composition of the photos weren't too
different from other funerary photos. The deceased were pictures lying in plush caskets, surrounded by flowers, sometimes stage to look like they were sleeping, but Vandersy added a little extra flavor onto his photos by manipulating them to include images of angels of the deceased while they were living, of scriptures and palms and other inserts that, according to Vandersey, take away the gruesomeness of the picture.
Yeah, I noticed that looking at his photos, and I
can see his influence on like obituaries. Maybe not the most modern obituaries now, but I feel like in the early two thousands, even the nineties, there was always like an angel and some flowers going on, and that's what he was putting in his photos, or you know, the picture of them while they're alive over them, which you know, looking at it then, like the technology was a little different, so it looks a little you know, cut out with scissors and pasted.
It does.
But you can definitely see his influence in more modern context. And I'm sure like all these people probably have no idea who this man is, but it's interesting to see that through line there.
Yeah, but one I will say, girl, obituary art has not changed much since the early two thousands. Really, it has truly not evolve that much. So it still is kind of in that vein. But you know, Venderzy did have to be skilled to do those photo manipulations, like not everybody was doing that, and that is something that set him apart. So not only was it that the execution need to be on point for what it was at the time, which the technology was definitely not as
advanced as it is today. But he had to have a little creativity and originality to think to even do these things. But I think part of that came from his artistry and came from his own spirit of like how he felt people should be portrayed in the kind of like light that should be brought to these photos, and the additional context that he wanted to act. And I think it also shows the way that he used
the inserts. It shows this very black tradition of funerals and dying not just being about sadness and mourning, but also being about the faith, you know, where the angels and the scripture came into it, about moving on from struggle, you know, going back home, it being a homegoing and that was really impued in his portraits by these inserts that he used. Another thing I was thinking of, you know, you said that you could see the influence of him.
I was thinking about those old Oln Mills photos. I don't know if you remember them, but they were black in the background and they had like a portrait of the family in the front. Probably facing one side, like maybe half profile, quarter turned or whatever you call that set up, and then a large floating head in the background. And if people haven't seen these photos, because the Harlem Book of the Dead is kind of hard to get
hold of. Yeah, but so if people haven't seen these photos, you know, kind of imagine that floating head and think about that being angels instead in the background are like pictures of soldiers in formation that he took from like more documentary photography and scriptures. Those are the kind of things and the kind of setup he had of what
he was doing for his portraiture. True artists, and though Vanderzy had his own particular style of post mortum portraiture that departed from the standard in many ways, it was imbued with all the symbology of its roots and meaning. The religious iconography, the church and funeral home settings, the emotion and drama in the poetry, the veneration of ancestors, the delicate treatment of loved one's bodies, the belief in
an afterlife. They all harken back to well worn black rituals of mourning, perspectives on death, reckoning with grief and community care. Vanderzy was already ninety one at the time of this interview. But if it weren't for Billip's efforts and putting the project together, we would have never got the interview at all, let alone a book documenting Vanderzy's funerary photography. Considering how prolific he was and how long he worked, his death portraiture was but a footnote in
many people's survey of his body of work. Tony Morrison, though knew what was up. The Harlem Book as a Dead inspired her novels Jazz and Beloved. She says in the forward to The Harlem Book of the Dead, the narrative quality, the intimacy, the humanity of his photographs are stunning. And the proof, if any is needed, is in this collection of photographs devoted exclusively to the dead, about which one can only say, how living are his portraits of the dead.
I really liked her forward.
I was like, you tell me why.
It was just so good, Okay, But I did write down part of what she said, so she was talking. She started off the forward talking about how people are like back in the day that was real portraits, which I thought was so funny because I feel like we would say that about that period of time. Everybody says like back in the day, it was better, no matter
when the day was. So she's like talking about that sentiment, like things are better back then, So she says, quote part of the enthusiasm is not critical evaluation, but simple nostalgia, a love affair with the past made more loving because the beloved is no longer with us and able to assert itself. And I just felt that was so true because like when people talk about things that are gone, whether they're like ideas or people, they're kind of like
frozen things. The person or the thing can't talk back, It can't refute what you're saying about them, really, and it made me think about just like pictures of the dead generally, like you can do all this manipulation and make them into an angel and have them, you know, surrounded by flowers and put a newspaper in their hand or try to fix their face so they're smiling, and you can make them what you want them to be, kind of like Markel's parents and family members, like putting
him in the club and like having his last hu rods, Like you get to to manipulate your loved one for the last time and then have like documentation of how you wanted them to be presented. So that's what her ford made me think of. So I feel like she was, you know, working on multiple levels just about photography in general, but specifically the subject of this photography.
And it's often not only just frozen in time, but frozen in positive time because you know, so often people like don't disrespect the name of the dead, like we only want to talk about the good things about them. So on top of the nostalgia, there's this like positivity regurgitation that happens all over whatever their legacy was, which is obviously very complex for a lot of people.
That shall.
When we get back from the break defending death rituals in the social media.
Era, So do people still take postportum photographs?
Of course, professional photography, yes, but also plenty of people who have a smartphone and can get a shot of their deceased love one. Back in the day, the reach was limited to how many people could see your photo album or could get a physical print of the photo. But now people are posting images and videos of the dead on social media, namely Facebook, for hundreds thousands, potentially millions to see. Just google this topic and you'll see
how controversial it is. People posting think pieces demanding others stop sharing pictures of the dead on social media, people asking folks on Kora if it's okay to post them, and a lot of people are not okay with seeing a picture of a deceased friend, family member, or even stranger when they open up their social media app.
Yeah, I've seen this happen before, like people getting really upset when someone posts an open casket of somebody. People who don't like it seem to consider it offensive and a violation of privacy, which I can see.
Yeah, it's fair, but some people take comfort in having and sharing photos of deceased loved ones. It's how they want to grieve. But that desire to mourn in the way that feels right to them bumps up against others' judgment, notions of appropriateness, morality, et cetera, et cetera.
And it can be hard to navigate managing ethics, feelings, opinions, and grief when the Internet is involved. We're in time when photos and videos of black people dying are spread endlessly and analyzed to death.
Definitely, And to be honest, I did think the open casket photos were kind of strange in the past, but I've had to check my own bias for sure, because it's really not a new practice, it's just set in a different context. These images of the day can still be portraits that tell stories of the living of our ancestors, even if the framing is a little off or the
lighting is bad. I appreciate being able to see it as the preserving of a morning practice that feels celebratory and hopeful, like we don't want to release the loved one's memory just because they transitioned.
We want to keep it alive.
Also, I'm thinking about how black folks are so good at bringing humor and levity into dark circumstances. Do you remember that shock wave of news that went around many years ago about all the corpses that were being dressed up and posed like they were alive thanks to extreme embalming.
No, I've never heard of this in my life, girl.
Yes, it was a whole thing. It was a moment, you know.
It was a moment that didn't last too long, as many things in the news cycle don't. But it was people dressing their deceased loved ones up, putting them in different scenes, basically like doing whole set design, being able to prop them up in different ways. They would work with the funeral home, I guess, to be able to embalm them and place them in the way that felt right, Okaya.
I wonder if they were like we are on the vanguard of a new way of displaying the dead.
You know, I don't know, but now that I'm thinking about it, I'm wondering, like if back in the day when people were staging their death portraits, they could only pose the bodies in certain ways because they were dead, so their bodies didn't move the same, so they had to be sitting up in certain ways, or sometimes they could stage them as lying down, as we talked about in some of Anderzy's.
Work that he did.
That was an old known way of staging dead portraits. So I'm wondering now if back then people would have seen this and be like, wow, I wish we had this kind of evolving and this kind of technology, because they could have staged the portraits differently. They could have had a little bit more pizazz and razzle dazzle in their portraits back then, versus the more standard poses they had to have.
Awesome I thinking, if you do someone in like a pose that's like real extra, then how do you get them in the casket after?
I don't know, that's a good question.
Maybe there's no casket at all, because that's how they were staged for the funerals, so that was the memorial service, so people would come to see the body in that way. So I don't even know if they were put in the caskets afterwards that people saw. I'm sure it wouldn't be hard for the people who are handling the body to put it in whatever casket they need to put it in for burial or for cremation, because they know how to work with bodies, and don't nobody need to
see it after that point? True, Yeah, it is a lot, you know. I'm not saying it's not a lot. But I don't know about you, But I associated this phenomenon with black people, and I don't actually know if more Black folks did it than any other race, but I can say that many black folks did partake in the trend.
I guess.
A woman named Miriam Marie Burkebank was embalmed in posed, sitting up, wearing shades and grasping the stem of a wineglass.
Okay, now that you say that, I feel like I have seen that picture. Did she have like long hair? Uh huh?
I think she did have long hair.
Yeah, I feel like she had on jeans or something.
I don't remember seeing the bottom of her because she was sitting at a table.
In my mind, she's sitting with the wine glass and she has her leg propped up. That's what I'm seeing.
Maybe she also had other alcohol around her around her and there was an ash tray with like a pack of cigarettes next to it because she loved a party.
Okay, I feel like I've seen this. Now that you now that you describe the su try to.
Block it out right. I'm not gouldn't be mad at that.
And after eighteen year old Matthews was shot and killed, his family had him propped up in a chair playing Xbox, sitting next to some Doritos and soda. I mean, it's so serious, but it's so unserious. A properly dramatic send off that feels like an extension of the playfulness, joy and spectacle that black folks bring to all our morning rituals.
Those Airbrush memorial t shirts come to mind.
Oh classic, but I know we're joking right now, but there is a more somber and serious side to death portraiture.
I think that can really come to mind because you know, we see so many death portraits that we don't choose to see on a very regular basis, because when people are shot in the United States and killed in the States sanctioned killings than images of debt people can float around on the Internet and we are non consensually exposed to them in so many ways and consensually in so many ways, and you watch.
Them over and over and over again.
But there is an instance that we all know, or a lot of us know here in the United States, where there was a death portrait that was share it with everyone, and that was a consensual choice, and that was Emmett Till's photograph of when he was in his casket.
I'm also thinking about how impactful it was for his mother made me tell Bradley to share photos of his body in his casket. She said, let the world see what I've seen. She wanted folks to face reality, to be as lit up as she was by the gruesome image of her son's body. She was in mourning, but she asked Jet photographer David Jackson to take photos of the funeral. She chose to share it in publications because she knew that photo can transmit grief into memorial empathy
and ultimately a movement. Emmett till his death. Portraiture is definitely like a different vibe for sure, but it still is storytelling and it really did launch the civil rights movement,
and it's interesting how death portraiture plays into it. And like you said, there's so many images of black people dying in a way that is not of our choosing the portraits itself, Like obviously the way Immettel died was not of his choosing, but even the portraits of black people dying, I'm thinking, like of Mike Brown and how they left him in the street like that, and you know, people took pictures and then posted that and it's like, you know, no one in his family chose for it
to be that way, to be shown that way, but imtt Tell's mom Maymi did choose that, And like all these other people are like choosing how they're like shown in death. There's a dignity to it, whether you like want to see the picture or not. I think that the choice of it makes it like different.
I agree, Yeah, the agency that made me tell Bradley had in it makes a really big difference. And that made her a storyteller too, because those were creative decisions that she made. But I think it was really impactful for her to do that and to understand, like so intrinsically seemingly what death portraiture could do, because as far
as I know, nobody told her to do that. So it's like she already had this sense that she didn't have to derive from anywhere outside of herself that death portraiture meant something like the Art Forum meant something, because people knew about his death already, so they already had knowledge in writing and newspapers, and they already had knowledge from just hearsaying what people are saying to each other,
news spreading that way. But she knew that the image captured in that way was going to have a different kind of impact. So it was an astute observation for her to say, no, let's do this, And it was also like a critical decision for the people who were at JET to publish the photos as well and to say, I'm going to do what.
She wants us to do.
So so it was a lot of coordination, you know, and structure around it that made it even more of a concerted storytelling effort on all of their parts.
Yeah, and Jet they knew it would sell those too. They knew it was like a business decision, but not saying that business decisions can't coincide with movement decisions, because in that case it did.
So Really, why police the ways that other folks choose to honor the dead like Markel Moreau's family. One thing that so many of the people who ordered extreme embalming said is that it's what their deceased loved one would have won it. So then the elaborate staging, the theatricality becomes a continuation of that person's story, their characteristics, their personality, the things they love to do, they're all on display.
And Katie, I have to say that.
Even though in the past I was really a little weirded out by people sharing the death portraits online, thinking about James Vandersey's work and learning more about death portraiture and the history of it, I've kind of shifted my feelings on it, Like I know, this is like me rewriting the narrative and away for myself and you know, doing a little bit of a revisionist history and my own history.
But I'm not mad at it.
I'm not I'm mad at it. Okay, I'm not mad at it. Okay, I'm mad at it being on the internet and me seeing it without my consent. But I think, like how I said, I would be like yelling at my grandma, like I don't want to take the picture. I mean I want to take the picture either, but like I do think it is important to have. But just like how everything is just like so accessible now, I truly do not need to see an open castt photo. I think, ever, that's fair.
Everybody's comfort level is different, and I think that's a difficult thing about it. I think that I may be because you know, I was already into like maybe a little bit more than an average person, into death planning and death care, and think about it a lot for myself, talk about wills with family, you know, I think about the ways that I would want to be buried and
what I want to happen and I die. I think I may be a person who confronts it a little bit more than the average person in the United States. I mean, I don't have the stats on that, but I'm quite comfortable with it, and like recently when I've had to plan a funeral, myself like was able to handle it because I think of all of that work
that I had already done. So I guess there was a part of me that had to question why the whys around it for me, like why was I so sensitive to this thing that we all have to deal with.
I must have to deal with it for myself. And I do know that there's been a shifting of that culture around death in the United States over time, where we've been more afraid to deal with it that I don't think is a holy positive thing, the way that we create distance from it because you know, we live to die essentially because we know it's coming at the end of everything.
So for me, it was just.
Like, oh, I had to consider why was I against it? And it wasn't a thing of consent for me because for me, I know when I log on the internet, I'm about to get some stuff I don't want to see. I thought it was from a different place for me, So I think that's part of why my feelings have
shifted on it. But that doesn't mean that I've lost the nuance that like that feeling can be different for everyone, and I don't necessarily prescribe that it's the right thing to do to share death portraiture on or I don't.
Even know if I want to call it portrait because that sounds really official.
But you know, open casket images on the internet, because that's an element that didn't exist in the eighteen hundreds or the early nineteen hundreds that we have to reckon with now. It's just I appreciate now having a larger lay of the land and thinking about they did this before, and they were used to death and we still should be. Death isn't the same, not the same magnitudes in the same ways, but we talk about it every day and
it's still a big part of black media. Black death is Yeah, I think it was a personal reckoning.
Well, I'm glad that you got that from doing this research in this episode.
Hmm.
It's the growth for me girl, all right. Now, Now it is time for roll credits, the segment where we give credit to a person place thank idea that we encountered during the week. Eves. You want to kick it.
Off, sure, and I'll just say something inspired by the episode. I will say Camille Billips, because, as I mentioned in the episode, the Harlem Book of the Dead wouldn't have been possible without her. She's the one who organized it. She was like, Hey, I think it would be a good idea for you to put all of your death
portraiture in one book. You know, he had all of this, these other photographs that we've seen, And she was like, and I think, you know, you should work with Owen Dotson and y'all can get together and y'all can put poetry along with the photos. And this needs to be shared with everyone. And it just makes me think about all the projects that wouldn't have happened if people didn't just say I have this feeling and it feels right,
let me just see if we can do it. And it's also inspirational for me to know that, like the long groll a parchment paper of ideas that I have and I'm like, isn't it good idy or not that like it could be so uh Yeah, I want to give credit to Kameil Billips today her work.
Yeah, there's so many things that just wouldn't exist if one person was like, Okay, I'm gonna go ahead and do it. You know, or like I'm gonna get the people together so we can do it. I would like to give credit to printed out pictures also kind of
relate it to today's episode. But my nephew gave me printed out pictures of himself for Valentine's Day and he was posing and he was so cute, and I'm just like, remember when we used to give each other pictures, Like I have like so many pictures of you that you like printed out and like wrote notes on the back of me.
Yeah, like school.
Pictures are just like pictures we take around, you know, and like we don't do that anymore. Like there's so many, Like we have so many pictures, but like they're not going to exist because the technology keeps changing and the files get corrupted and you try to print them out later and it's all blurry because it's on your iPhone too. So I love a printed photograph and I would like to give credit to that today. I love that. And with that, we will see y'all next week. Bye hy bye, bye bye bye.
On Theme is a production of iHeartRadio and Fairweather Friends Media. This episode was written by Eves Jeffco and Katie Mitchell. It was edited and produced by Tari Harrison. Follow us on Instagram at on Themeshow. You can also send us an email at hello at on Theme dot Show. Head to on Theme dot Show to check out the show notes for episodes. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.