ABSTRACT
Photographs in family and personal archives form the reservoir out of which photographic biographies of deceased people are constructed. In the central province of Kenya from the 1950s onwards, Christians began not only to take post-mortem photographs of deceased relatives but also to insert photography as act and object into funeral rites and other rites de passage. As part of Christian funerals, photographs selected for the construction of biographies enter a highly emotional space, characterized by death, loss and mourning. Although death is denied and turned into a 'celebration of life' by Kenyan Christians and the dead are 'resurrected' in their photographic biography, the photographs are haunted by death and photography becomes thanatography, an account of a person's death. In the photographic biography, life is constructed as a successive accumulation of people and other forms of wealth – cattle, land, plants and car.
