The light of the funereal: children's post mortem photography in the city of Loja

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of the images of "little angels", post mortem photographs of children taken in the city of Loja, Ecuador by the photographer, also from Loja, J. Reinaldo Vaca Piedra, who has a repository of at least 60 of these images. The ways of producing, circulating and preserving these photographs are part of a specific visual economy, a symbolic exchange in which both the photographer and the bereaved give the images emotional characteristics. Likewise, the conservation and devotion of this type of images helps to understand the ways of remembering and making memory of the Lojano society of the first years of the 20th century.