Juliana Sohn was visiting relatives in South Korea 15 years ago when she walked into a discussion between her grandmother and her mother. The older woman needed a portrait. For her funeral.

“You know, she’s a professional photographer,” her mother said, referring to Ms. Sohn.

“The tone of the conversation was like they were talking about the weather,” Ms. Sohn recalled. “It didn’t have the kind of gravity or tone I was used to with people talking about death.”

There’s who you are, who you think you are and how you want to be remembered. For Koreans, funerary portraits, which honor the dead at funerals, symbolize all three. The unexpected exchange between her mother and grandmother led Ms. Sohn to embark on a project with these portraits in all their complexity.

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“I have learned that when an older person looks at themself they don’t necessarily see what is reflected in the mirror,” said Ms. Sohn, who was born in Seoul and moved to New Jersey as a child. “They don’t see themselves the way I would see them, a stranger meeting them for the first time. They remember what they looked like and felt like when they were years younger, and this personal history affects the way they see themselves now and want to be represented. Or perhaps by the time some seniors decide they need a funerary portrait, they are older than they had hoped to look in a portrait that will memorialize them.”

Several years later, when Ms. Sohn started to envision these portraits as a project, she realized that for Koreans, the practice is just a matter of responsibility, like a last will and testament. They are so common in Korea, Ms. Sohn said, that there are photo studios just for customers needing one.

Not so much in the United States, where they are usually arranged through churches or Korean community centers. “It’s generally done by someone who is a well-meaning amateur,” Ms. Sohn said. “And I’m not sure how successful a lot of the results are.”

Ms. Sohn thought she could give back to her community with her professional skills by providing portraits to Koreans in her father’s New Jersey church. Although she was too late — someone had beat her to it — she went elsewhere, hoping to provide a service, as well as to create a body of artwork, which she likens to a memento mori.

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“Death is portrayed in the artwork of many cultures and religions,” she said. “There is a moral aspect of the memento mori, as it reminds people of their mortality and the vanity of earthly riches. I believe the responsibility of having to set aside a funerary portrait reminds Koreans of their mortality.”

Over the course of five years, Ms. Sohn photographed funerary portraits for about 100 older Koreans whom she found in churches, Korean senior centers and community centers in New Jersey and New York. She tried to capture the person’s essence rather than the reality of how they looked. She uses Photoshop to erase blemishes or, in the case of one woman with a stroke, any disfigurations.

There is little research into the origin of funerary portraits. It was suggested to Ms. Sohn that they might stem from an older Korean tradition of writing the deceased person’s name vertically on a banner.

“This was used on the person’s death day to pray for them, functioning much like the current funerary portraits,” she said. “When Christianity came to Korea this practice of ancestor worship was forbidden. Replacing the banner with a photo of the deceased was the Koreans’ way of working around the ban.”

The project inadvertently brought her closer to her own relatives from whom she has always felt a little distant, if only out of respect for her elders.

“This whole process has made me understand my elders and seniors,” she said, “and that sort of emotional wall between me and them where I can’t relate to them has really been broken down for me.”

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