Brian Pipon whose family have lived in the parish for centuries are visiting the graves of his ancestors. In An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, art historian and theorist Hans Belting talks about the relationship between image and death in different religions and cultures and highlights the inherent paradoxical nature of photography, or more precisely the symbolic function of ‘images [making] a physical (a body’s) absence visible by transforming it into iconic presence.’ It is however not the meaning of death that Belting is concerned with but the quest for the image; both the physical image (either as print or pixels on a screen) and the mental image ‘that live only in our thinking and in our imagination’. Belting cites Gaston Bachelard’s formula that ‘death had first been an image, and it will ever remain an image’, since we do not know what death looks like. In order to understand the intangible nature of the mental image, Belting introduces ‘the gaze as a vector for transmitting mental images to material picture and back.’ In other words; ‘the gaze [is] the force that turns a picture into an image and an image into a picture.’ Maybe Mr Pipon, who because of his age is at risk in a pandemic that appears to kill the most vulnerable first is contemplating the nature of death and how it may appear.