Long before critics began theorizing about the medium public perception had ceased upon photography’s most salient feature- its commemorative power. Early photographic portraits were inseparable from mourning, a connection which sometimes extended to the ritual photography of carefully laid-out corpses. Even without going to such extremes, it is obvious that every photographic portrait ever taken will sooner or later depict somebody who has died, and it is in this context that family albums acquire their greatest poignancy. Everybody is familiar with the way in which photographs of their recent dead take on a gravitas which was perhaps absent when the subject was still alive. In many cultures, photographs are still part of funeral rituals. In Ireland, photographs of the deceased are prominently displayed during wakes; in Italy they may be transferred on to porcelain and fixed to the front of an ossuary; in California they are placed in splendid gilt frames, and dominate chapels of rest. In Greece, a characteristic of poorer funerary monuments is often a shallow, glassed-in niche in which are kept such items as a few plastic flowers, a mass-produced icon and the incense burner or oil-lamp essential for the family’s periodic remembrance services. Very often, the collection will include a photograph of the deceased: sometimes a formal studio portrait, sometimes a snapshot or a clumsily tinted blow-up. Stelios Efstathopoulos’ Cemetery Photographs, a sequence compiled in the late eighties, focuses closely on these recycled images working-class cemeteries around Athens. The photographs depicted are of all kinds and conditions, from the new and shiny to the faded and barely legible. Here, we realize, is the paradox of the photographic image as commemoration: upon the subject’s death, the surviving images acquire a talismanic value for the survivors, but this status is far from fixed; as memory of the deceased person gets dimmer, the significance of the images gradually diminishes until, with the passing of time, they merge once more into the body of the anonymous dead. It is at that point precisely that they achieve an elegiac value which is no longer specific but universal.