Needed: Home Funeral Images Free for Noncommercial Use

Steve Burns, a graduate student and film production instructor at Indiana University whose students filmed the "When Death Knocks" symposium in Greensboro in March, just emailed me to ask if I knew of any good sources of still images (photographs or drawings) of family-directed home funerals.

This is a real need. If you have images of home funerals and have the authority to grant permission for others to use your photos for noncommercial purposes, please let me know. It would be wonderful if you would consider placing a Creative Commons Noncommercial-Attribution-ShareAlike or similarly generous copyright on your images so that others can use them for humanitarian, noncommercial uses. This would increase blogging about home funerals as well as enhance the readability of websites and publications that include content about home funerals. In fact, I would like to see the Undertaken With Love website start a photo gallery of such images that others could use.

If you have such images to share, please indicate whether you wish to use the Creative Commons license recommended here or another similar one and the following details:

• Name of the copyright owner, to which the image should be attributed
• If that is not you, how we can contact the copyright owner for proper permissions
• Any descriptions of the photo that you would like to make public, such as date, place, and what or who is depicted
• Your relationship to the deceased's next of kin. If you are not an immediate family member, please give us contact information for the next of kin so that we can obtain their permission also.

What kinds of images are needed? Some examples:

• Handmade or decorated caskets, open or closed
  
• Tasteful pictures of the deceased in a home funeral environment
• Pictures of children assisting in some manner with the home funeral
• Pictures of ceremonies in a home environment
• Artwork created for use in a home funeral
• Handmade invitations to a home funeral
• Image showing the casket being transported in some manner by loved ones
• Discrete images of the process of bathing and dressing the body -- perhaps a close up of a hand being washed, or a necklace being lovingly attached
• Images of a finished gravesite
• Images of a table of mementoes or other items collected for a funeral
• Images of a meal being shared connected to a home funeral

Thanks for your consideration.