This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine

There is an idea from Día de los Muertos that I keep coming back to.

A person dies three times. Once when their body stops. Once when they are buried. And a final time, when the last person who remembers them is gone.

I went looking for a photograph of my great-grandparents to put on an ofrenda. There isn't one. Nobody in my family has a single picture of them. I don't know their faces at all.

So I went to the public archives instead, and found page after page of people in the same situation as my great-grandparents. Portraits from India, a hundred years old and more, labelled with a single line:

Unidentified woman.

Milk-woman, studio photograph.

Indian Christian, India, ca. 1910.

Someone loved each of these people. Someone paid for that photograph, dressed them in their best clothes, told them to hold still.…