Instagram model dubbed ‘classless’ after posing for photos at father’s funeral

Model Jayne Rivera posted eight photographs of herself posing in a sultry black dress in front of her father’s open coffin at his funeral.

The caption underneath the photos read, “Butterfly fly away. RIP Papi, you were my best friend. A life well lived.” 

However, many online commenters felt that photos were more of a thinly veiled attempt to garner personal attention rather than a genuine outpouring of emotion regarding her father’s death.

Regardless of Ms Rivera’s genuine intentions with the images, the overwhelmingly negative response to the funeral photoshoot prompted the model to delete her Instagram account altogether.

The pictures eventually found their way onto a variety of social media platforms and continued to fuel online debate regarding the moral issue of posing for pictures at funerals and the lengths that people will go to for online attention.

While the vast majority of online sentiment was that the pictures felt exploitive, there were some that saw no harm in the pictures being posted.

“A funeral is about the person who is dead, not those in attendance … It’s wrong to take such a significant ritual and turn it into vanity fair,” wrote one commenter, while others used a more sarcastic approach.

“What is a funeral if not an opportunity to create content,” wrote one person.

What do you think? While it’s clear that people deal with grief in a variety of manners, do you feel that posing for candid photographs at a funeral is disrespectful?