A Unique Way to Mourn: Photo Shoots with Cardboard Cutouts

Jinna Yang and her father’s cardboard cutout at the Blue Lagoon in Iceland.
Credit: Jinna Yang / Project Inspo

Jinna Yang, a photographer based in New York, became severely depressed after losing her 52-year-old father to cancer, according to her blog. To honor his memory, she decided to fulfill his dream of traveling the world – alongside a cardboard cutout of his image. She shared the resulting pictures from Europe and Iceland at landmarks including St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Skogafoss Waterfall in Iceland, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy.

“My father never had a chance to travel the world,” Yang wrote. “He sacrificed his entire life for others – his parents, his children, his wife, his family and his friends.” Inspired by the movie “Up in the Air,” in which George Clooney’s character carries a (much smaller) cardboard cutout of his sister and her fiancé around the U.S., Yang commissioned a life-sized cutout, which she then scored and folded flat for easy transport.

Yang poses with a 6-foot cardboard cutout of her father at the Eiffel Tower.
Credit: Jinna Yang / Project Inspo

Yang is not the only person to have turned to cardboard to commemorate a loved one. CJ Infantino, who lost his wife Ariana – the mother of his three young children — to cancer, decided to bring a life-sized cardboard cutout of her image to the family’s annual photo shoot at a local park in the California Bay Area. “We went to one of the ponds, and we were trying to lift her up and pretend like she was super heavy,” Infantino told People magazine. “And then the one that always makes me laugh is the one where I actually took a photo with her. We were together, and it’s just so goofy and outlandish. It makes me laugh every time I look at it.”

In New Orleans, cardboard cutouts, also known as “lifesizes,” are commonly created to memorialize young Black people who’ve died from gun violence. “They still take pictures with them as if the person’s never passed,” Trenice McMillian, the owner of local cutout vendor Platinum Graphics, told NPR. “For them to be able to still go out, still have fun with this poster that’s standing right alongside of them, it actually does really help them.”

Numerous online companies sell life-sized cardboard cutouts, some of which are marketed specifically for funerals. To some, like this Reddit user, the concept of involving one’s dead loved one as a cardboard cutout in life events is off-putting, to say the least. Yet to others, it brings peace, comfort, and fresh memories-in-the-making.

“My entire family was so moved from the support we’ve received through the community, and the photographs of me and my dad together around the world made them so happy,” Yang wrote. “It brought me and my family a form of peace, and that was the purpose of this project.”