Ms. Doughty is the founder of the Order of the Good Death and the author of “Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?” published last September, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory” and other jauntily titled books designed to demystify death. With her Bettie Page crop, she is an avatar of the goth-inflected sub-tribe of death professionals.

“It’s not like no one never took a photo of Mom in the coffin,” Ms. Doughty said. “I have pictures of my grandparents in their caskets fully embalmed. But the sense of ownership has changed. It’s not, ‘Mom is handed to the funeral parlor and they do something behind the scenes and sell the body back to you.’ Sure, you could take photos but it’s like a statue in a museum. The product of someone else’s art. My sense of why we are seeing more and more photos of these natural bodies is because the families have prepared them themselves, they’ve done a job together and they are proud of their work.”

Ms. Doughty advises families on home death rituals and best practices, like how to keep the dead cool with packs of dry ice. “One family texted me photos as they worked, though not to say, ‘How are we doing?’ but, ‘Look how beautiful.’ I think people have this fear that Mom is going to be this otherworldly creepy thing, and then when that doesn’t happen, they want to capture it.”

Ms. Cunningham, the funeral director in Brooklyn, recalled addressing a group of Unitarians in Albany a few years ago, and saying that she wasn’t sure she would want to be viewed, post-mortem, by her friends and family. That she would prefer to be looking her best. A nonagenarian yelled out, quite sharply, as she remembered, “‘You’ll get over that!’”

“And that got me thinking,” Ms. Cunningham said. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to die unfettered and free from worrying about how I look?”

Remembrance Portraits

Cancer patients and others with terminal illnesses have long used photos and videos to bear witness to their suffering and make visible that which is considered off limits — on blogs, Twitter and now TikTok — and have encouraged family members and friends to do so on their behalf when they are no longer able to, pushing visual and emotional boundaries well beyond what may be considered comfortable.