Digital Dying Blog

Priscilla Etienne runs a London-based company called Funeography that takes professional photos at funerals. She has been featured on the BBC and in Popular Photography. Digital Dying spoke with Priscilla about her beef with funeral directors, why weddings are boring and the reason she's dying to photograph a gypsy funeral. Most people aren't accustomed to [...]

Mukarram Khan Atif was number two. The second journalist killed so far in 2012, that is. He was gunned down while praying at a mosque in Shabqadar, in northern Pakistan. A terrorist group called the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility. Atif worked for a Pakistani TV channel and served as a stringer for Voice of [...]

Diane McCloud was freed from jail earlier this week, but only so she could die. McCloud, 48, was in Nassau County jail for shoplifting more than $3,500 worth of goods from Target. “She's terminal,” said her lawyer. “It's just so she can die easier and pain-free.” McCloud's case was unusual, usually dying prisoners end up [...]

Norman Miller fought in World War II then Korea and has been leading Freemason funeral services ever since. He currently lives in El Paso, Texas. Digital Dying spoke with him over the phone about how he got started, what a Freemason funeral is like and after seeing so many deaths, how he keeps going. The [...]

It was a strange year for weather and perhaps an even stranger one for dying, here are some of the weirdest deaths of 2011: Stabbed to death at a cockfight - Jose Luis Ochoa was attending an illegal cockfight in Tulare County, California when he was stabbed in the leg by a cock that had [...]

The past week saw the death of three very different famous figures: North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Il; Czech playwright and president, Vaclav Havel and Cesaria Evora, a musical sensation from the Cape Verde Islands known as the Barefoot Diva, because she never performed in shoes. Of course, many less well known famous people died [...]

  People come to Paris for the food, the museums and the shops but also for the cemeteries. There is the Pere-Lachaise Cemetery, which opened in 1804 and receives more than a million and a half visitors a year, many of them coming to see the grave of legendary rock singer Jim Morrison. At Montparnasse [...]

“On June 12th 2011, I'm turning 9 and I found out that millions of people don't live to see their 5th birthday,” Rachel Beckwith, of Bellevue, Washington recently wrote on a donation webpage she set up with the aid organization, charity:water. “And why? Because they didn't have access to clean, safe water. I'm asking from [...]

Last week marked the 38th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, an event that only grows more epic with time. Several new books address the assassination, including one by horror guru Stephen King, entitled, 11/22/63, about a Maine school teacher who travels back in time in an attempt to stop Lee Harvey [...]

Hurricane Irene roared up the East Coast last August, leaving a wide and varied path of destruction: in New Jersey at least one woman drowned in her car, Virginia experienced the second largest power outage in the state's history, in Delaware a tornado tore off the roof of a house and in Rochester, Vermont a [...]

Shocking child deaths were all over the news last week: a 6 year-old in Collinsville, Illinois dropped dead on the playground from a brain aneurism, a California mother whose four children died in an apartment fire was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and a fifth grader in the tiny Midwest town of Ridge Farm that [...]