Selfies At Funerals

2013Single-topic blog / curated collectiondead

Also known as: Funeral Selfies

Selfies At Funerals is a 2013 Tumblr blog created by journalist Jason Feifer that curated self-portraits taken at funeral services, sparking debate about social media etiquette and generational narcissism.

Selfies at Funerals is a single-topic Tumblr blog created by journalist Jason Feifer on October 28, 2013, collecting and curating self-portraits people took while attending funeral services2. The blog sparked an instant media firestorm about social media etiquette, generational narcissism, and whether photographing yourself at a funeral crosses a line1. Its brief but intense run peaked when Barack Obama took a selfie at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in December 20133.

selfie memestumblr memesmoral panic memessocial media culture memes

Overview

Selfies at Funerals was a Tumblr blog that collected screenshots of selfies people posted to Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms while at or en route to funerals, wakes, and memorial services5. The posts ranged from bathroom mirror selfies at funeral homes to graveyard shots, often accompanied by captions that mixed grief with casual social media behavior. The blog didn't add much editorial commentary. It mostly let the images speak for themselves, which made the cringe factor hit harder4.

Jason Feifer, a senior editor at Fast Company, launched the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr on October 28, 20135. He wasn't starting from scratch. Feifer had already been running a similar project called Selfies at Serious Places, which collected self-portraits taken at Holocaust memorials, concentration camps, and other somber locations3. The funeral-specific blog was a sharper, more focused version of the same concept.

Feifer sourced the photos from public social media posts where people had willingly shared their funeral selfies2. The subjects were mostly teenagers and young adults, many of whom seemed at least partially aware of how inappropriate the photos might look. One widely shared example featured a teen girl who captioned her post: "I took a selfie in the bathroom at a funeral today and I think that makes me a bad person"1.

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr
Key People
Jason Feifer
Date
2013

Jason Feifer, a senior editor at Fast Company, launched the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr on October 28, 2013. He wasn't starting from scratch. Feifer had already been running a similar project called Selfies at Serious Places, which collected self-portraits taken at Holocaust memorials, concentration camps, and other somber locations. The funeral-specific blog was a sharper, more focused version of the same concept.

Feifer sourced the photos from public social media posts where people had willingly shared their funeral selfies. The subjects were mostly teenagers and young adults, many of whom seemed at least partially aware of how inappropriate the photos might look. One widely shared example featured a teen girl who captioned her post: "I took a selfie in the bathroom at a funeral today and I think that makes me a bad person".

How It Spread

The blog took off almost immediately. Within 24 hours of launch, Gawker, Business Insider, and The Huffington Post had all written about it. HuffPost called funeral selfies "the latest evidence apocalypse can't come soon enough". Business Insider ran the story under a straightforward headline showcasing the Tumblr's finds.

By October 30, The Guardian had published an opinion piece asking readers whether funeral selfies were genuinely bad form or simply a new way of processing grief. Salon took a more sympathetic angle that same day, arguing some of the photos showed genuine attempts at emotional connection rather than pure vanity. FlavorWire pushed back on the generational framing entirely, publishing a piece titled "No, Selfies at Funerals Doesn't Prove Teenage Millennials Are Any More Narcissistic Than Adults".

The blog's biggest moment came in December 2013, when Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt posed for a selfie during the memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Feifer noted the timing on his blog, writing: "I'd intended for the post below to be the final one here, but then this just happened at Nelson Mandela's memorial service. Not exactly a funeral, to be fair, but I'll just go ahead and take credit for the whole thing".

The word "selfie" itself was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in November 2013, just weeks after the blog launched. The timing was coincidental but gave the blog additional cultural weight during a moment when self-portraiture was already dominating public conversation.

How to Use This Meme

Selfies at Funerals was a curated collection, not a participatory meme format. People didn't intentionally create content for it. Instead, Feifer found publicly posted funeral selfies and reposted them to the blog. The "format" is simple: take a selfie at or near a funeral, post it to social media with a caption, and risk becoming internet-famous for all the wrong reasons. Common patterns included bathroom mirror shots at funeral homes, car selfies on the way to services, and posed photos near caskets or headstones.

Cultural Impact

The blog landed at the exact intersection of two 2013 anxieties: the selfie boom and hand-wringing about millennial social media behavior. It triggered a wave of think pieces that went well beyond meme coverage into genuine cultural criticism.

Academic researchers later examined the controversy as a case study in what they called "boundary-work," where the public was actively negotiating which online practices were acceptable in the context of death and mourning. The paper argued that competing ideas about youthful online expression were clashing with established norms of respectful grief, and the blog made that tension visible.

The Obama selfie at Mandela's memorial service brought the conversation to world leaders, proving that the impulse to take selfies in serious settings wasn't limited to teenagers. Media coverage of that moment largely recycled the same framing Feifer's blog had introduced weeks earlier.

Fun Facts

The blog's entire active run lasted roughly six weeks, from late October to mid-December 2013, but generated coverage from dozens of major outlets.

One of the most shared examples was a young man named Grant Schofield who posed next to a statue of a breastfeeding woman at his grandfather's funeral and tweeted "killing the selfie game at pop's funeral".

Feifer wrote a longer explanation of the project for The Guardian after the Obama selfie incident.

The Selfies at Serious Places blog once received a self-submission from someone who sent photos of themselves at Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camp museums in Poland, with a note simply saying "Appreciate the site".

"Selfie" was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in November 2013, with the dictionary tracing its first known use to an Australian internet forum in 2002.

Derivatives & Variations

Selfies at Serious Places

— Feifer's earlier Tumblr project that collected selfies at concentration camps, memorials, and other inappropriate locations. It was the direct precursor to the funeral-specific blog[3].

Frequently Asked Questions

Selfies At Funerals

2013Single-topic blog / curated collectiondead

Also known as: Funeral Selfies

Selfies At Funerals is a 2013 Tumblr blog created by journalist Jason Feifer that curated self-portraits taken at funeral services, sparking debate about social media etiquette and generational narcissism.

Selfies at Funerals is a single-topic Tumblr blog created by journalist Jason Feifer on October 28, 2013, collecting and curating self-portraits people took while attending funeral services. The blog sparked an instant media firestorm about social media etiquette, generational narcissism, and whether photographing yourself at a funeral crosses a line. Its brief but intense run peaked when Barack Obama took a selfie at Nelson Mandela's memorial service in December 2013.

selfie memes tumblr memes moral panic memes social media culture memes

Overview

Selfies at Funerals was a Tumblr blog that collected screenshots of selfies people posted to Twitter, Instagram, and other social platforms while at or en route to funerals, wakes, and memorial services. The posts ranged from bathroom mirror selfies at funeral homes to graveyard shots, often accompanied by captions that mixed grief with casual social media behavior. The blog didn't add much editorial commentary. It mostly let the images speak for themselves, which made the cringe factor hit harder.

Jason Feifer, a senior editor at Fast Company, launched the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr on October 28, 2013. He wasn't starting from scratch. Feifer had already been running a similar project called Selfies at Serious Places, which collected self-portraits taken at Holocaust memorials, concentration camps, and other somber locations. The funeral-specific blog was a sharper, more focused version of the same concept.

Feifer sourced the photos from public social media posts where people had willingly shared their funeral selfies. The subjects were mostly teenagers and young adults, many of whom seemed at least partially aware of how inappropriate the photos might look. One widely shared example featured a teen girl who captioned her post: "I took a selfie in the bathroom at a funeral today and I think that makes me a bad person".

Origin & Background

Platform
Tumblr
Key People
Jason Feifer
Date
2013

Jason Feifer, a senior editor at Fast Company, launched the Selfies at Funerals Tumblr on October 28, 2013. He wasn't starting from scratch. Feifer had already been running a similar project called Selfies at Serious Places, which collected self-portraits taken at Holocaust memorials, concentration camps, and other somber locations. The funeral-specific blog was a sharper, more focused version of the same concept.

Feifer sourced the photos from public social media posts where people had willingly shared their funeral selfies. The subjects were mostly teenagers and young adults, many of whom seemed at least partially aware of how inappropriate the photos might look. One widely shared example featured a teen girl who captioned her post: "I took a selfie in the bathroom at a funeral today and I think that makes me a bad person".

How It Spread

The blog took off almost immediately. Within 24 hours of launch, Gawker, Business Insider, and The Huffington Post had all written about it. HuffPost called funeral selfies "the latest evidence apocalypse can't come soon enough". Business Insider ran the story under a straightforward headline showcasing the Tumblr's finds.

By October 30, The Guardian had published an opinion piece asking readers whether funeral selfies were genuinely bad form or simply a new way of processing grief. Salon took a more sympathetic angle that same day, arguing some of the photos showed genuine attempts at emotional connection rather than pure vanity. FlavorWire pushed back on the generational framing entirely, publishing a piece titled "No, Selfies at Funerals Doesn't Prove Teenage Millennials Are Any More Narcissistic Than Adults".

The blog's biggest moment came in December 2013, when Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron, and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt posed for a selfie during the memorial service for Nelson Mandela. Feifer noted the timing on his blog, writing: "I'd intended for the post below to be the final one here, but then this just happened at Nelson Mandela's memorial service. Not exactly a funeral, to be fair, but I'll just go ahead and take credit for the whole thing".

The word "selfie" itself was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in November 2013, just weeks after the blog launched. The timing was coincidental but gave the blog additional cultural weight during a moment when self-portraiture was already dominating public conversation.

How to Use This Meme

Selfies at Funerals was a curated collection, not a participatory meme format. People didn't intentionally create content for it. Instead, Feifer found publicly posted funeral selfies and reposted them to the blog. The "format" is simple: take a selfie at or near a funeral, post it to social media with a caption, and risk becoming internet-famous for all the wrong reasons. Common patterns included bathroom mirror shots at funeral homes, car selfies on the way to services, and posed photos near caskets or headstones.

Cultural Impact

The blog landed at the exact intersection of two 2013 anxieties: the selfie boom and hand-wringing about millennial social media behavior. It triggered a wave of think pieces that went well beyond meme coverage into genuine cultural criticism.

Academic researchers later examined the controversy as a case study in what they called "boundary-work," where the public was actively negotiating which online practices were acceptable in the context of death and mourning. The paper argued that competing ideas about youthful online expression were clashing with established norms of respectful grief, and the blog made that tension visible.

The Obama selfie at Mandela's memorial service brought the conversation to world leaders, proving that the impulse to take selfies in serious settings wasn't limited to teenagers. Media coverage of that moment largely recycled the same framing Feifer's blog had introduced weeks earlier.

Fun Facts

The blog's entire active run lasted roughly six weeks, from late October to mid-December 2013, but generated coverage from dozens of major outlets.

One of the most shared examples was a young man named Grant Schofield who posed next to a statue of a breastfeeding woman at his grandfather's funeral and tweeted "killing the selfie game at pop's funeral".

Feifer wrote a longer explanation of the project for The Guardian after the Obama selfie incident.

The Selfies at Serious Places blog once received a self-submission from someone who sent photos of themselves at Treblinka and Majdanek concentration camp museums in Poland, with a note simply saying "Appreciate the site".

"Selfie" was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in November 2013, with the dictionary tracing its first known use to an Australian internet forum in 2002.

Derivatives & Variations

Selfies at Serious Places

— Feifer's earlier Tumblr project that collected selfies at concentration camps, memorials, and other inappropriate locations. It was the direct precursor to the funeral-specific blog[3].

Frequently Asked Questions