Where the idea to take photographs of a cemetery came from I don’t really know. I was thinking about publicly accessible locations around Rochester where I could take some architectural style photos and the next thing you know I’m walking in Mount Hope Cemetery. Sometimes we don’t like to think about cemeteries as they put us in mind of our own mortality, but we can’t really escape them. From the tiny plot of a couple of dozen graves just down the country road from my house to the much larger Mount Hope with 350,000 sites – cemeteries are everywhere. I can think of four off the top of my head just in my little town. I drive by two of them practically everyday.
Ah, but Mount Hope is no ordinary cemetery. According to the City of Rochester’s web site, Mount Hope Cemetery, “dedicated in 1838, is America’s first municipal Victorian cemetery”. It is 196 park–like acres of beautiful trees and rolling hills jam packed with mausoleums, obelisks, statuary, and tombstones that range from simple markers to multi-ton ornately carved blocks. Scattered amongst the graves of people known only to their friends and families are the resting places of well known historic figures like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, the children and foster son of Buffalo Bill Cody (strangely enough), and many 19th century captains of industry, government, and the armed forces.
So for the past week or two I’ve been sneaking off to the cemetery to take photographs. Sometimes I go in the morning and sometimes in the evening to try out different lighting conditions. So far I have been just wandering and photographing whatever catches my eye. I haven’t made a conscious effort to shoot specific markers or buildings. The famous sites are obvious subjects and I’ve hit some of them, but I 
seem to be drawn more to the sites of regular people. The historic sites are too textbooky for me to seem real – they become exhibits, but when I walk among the stones of people I don’t know for any other reason than their names are carved there, it somehow comes home to me in a very personal way.
I’ve been shooting black and white only. It seems to fit with the subject and the time period. I saw a quote recently by Canadian photographer Ted Grant:
“When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls.”
I like it. I feel it carries over into this situation.
I’ve got more images to develop and more to take so I’ll post on this subject again. I’m trying to get a good group of prints together and hung on my studio walls in time for the August First Friday opening (Aug 5th 6 – 10PM). Come on by and take a look if you get a chance.
MDW
#1 by lookingforbeauty on July 20, 2011 - 2:31 pm
Nice vein of inquiry, Mark. I like the austerity of your photos. There’s nothing superfluous about them and they capture the quiet dignity and calm of place that you are photographing.
Kristin
#2 by fencer on July 20, 2011 - 9:49 pm
Hi Mark,
Cemetaries are places of poignancy and meditation to me, giving a sense of the life that has been, receding back into time. Wonderful subject for the photography you do….
Regards
#3 by MDW on July 27, 2011 - 3:09 pm
Thanks guys.
I like this subject and I’ll probably go back there again, maybe in the winter. On the other hand it isn’t exactly the kind of thing folks would want to buy and hang over the sofa so maybe I’ll move on to something else for now.
MDW
#4 by lookingforbeauty on July 27, 2011 - 3:52 pm
I just had a fantastic conversation with a vehement art dealer who was in a fury with one of his “stable” of artists. He was angry because there were skulls in a few of the paintings one artist had brought for a solo show, too late for any objection to be made.
“Who would want a skull hanging up in their living room! or even in their boardroom?” he said.
He went on to say that, although he preferred edgy art, he had to make a living from his business and he didn’t have any clientele for paintings with skulls.
When you consider it from the art dealer’s point of view, it must be hard to sell paintings with certain elements (skulls, headstones, etc.) in them. On the other hand, there are some of us that find them romantic, or just plain truthful about man’s condition, so don’t shy away from them.
When I get a chance, travelling, I like to go into graveyards. Not the manicured type one finds in major cities nor those military ones with the crosses row on row (but they too can be interesting). Instead, I like the old ones where the monuments tell a story about how people lived (and died) short lives.
Some of the memorable ones I saw:
One in the Queen Charlottes where the average age was about 25 – an isolated community, no doctors, epidemics of childhood diseases, etc.
One in Wellington New Zealand where there was a group of graves – six children and a mother died within 10 days, all around Christmas – surely some wicked flu or small pox, or cholera. How incredibly sad. How lucky we are to have good medicine now.
Anyway, Mark, you may end up finding a few clients for them, but don’t quit your day job based on these ones, even if they are achingly beautiful.
I love the ones with the columns – now those are classics and I bet you will find a buyer for them.
K
#5 by MDW on July 29, 2011 - 1:09 pm
I can see both sides of this deal – the artist wants to go where inspiration leads, but the dealer (and the artist too for that matter) need to put food on the table. Sounds like the kind of thing that’s been going on since art was invented so to speak.
I’m surprised that skulls caused such a problem. The rise in popularity of extreme sports and tattooing have made the skull a pretty common sight – maybe it’s mostly a crass U.S. kind of thing though. I’ve got sneakers with skulls on them and my son wears shirts to school with skulls and flames and stuff on them. Nobody seems to mind. Then again I’m not sure I’d hang a big skull painting on my wall at home – maybe if it was done right.
It will be interesting to see the reactions I get next Friday. It will probably be the topic of my next post.
MDW
#6 by lookingforbeauty on July 30, 2011 - 11:41 am
Hi Mark,
I’ll be looking for those reactions. I take it you have a show coming up?
I’m not sure that the younger generation is in the position to buy much art; and if they do, it might just be the lower priced stuff. But it’s a completely different market than the corporate boardroom/home consumption market.
I know the “artistic freedom” arguments of the artist very well. In the last years, I’ve come to appreciate what good dealers can do for artists that artists cannot do for themselves. They often assume an enormous rent, month by month, that has to be paid through sales. In order to do that they have to find rich clients – it’s not by hundred dollar sales that they make it, but by ones in the thousands.
To do that, they need to spend a lot of time and energy on advertising which, normally, is prohibitive for the artist. They keep a staff on, in order to keep the gallery open, and they often pay writers and/or curators to write blurbs for each show. They foot the bill for the schmoozing opening. And in the end, they have to pay for their own living – and it’s not necessarily a high one. The 2 dealers that I’ve known a little bit more than grazing-shoulders-in-passing acquaintance have looked professional and well-to-do in their gallery surroundings, but their own lives are oft fraught with the worries about the next set of bills, and often,how to pay everyone at the end of the month – because everyone comes before they do – staff, artists, writers, advertisments, promotions, telephone, IT and electricity bills.
So when they are upstaged by an artist with images which they don’t have a clientele for, they has to scramble, and he may not have a single sale. What does he do then? He has either to have deep pockets or an understanding banker.
Artist’s side of the coin?
I thought about this artist’s new work in context of some of my own (and mine hs been slightly edgy, but nowhere near as accessible as the skull-in-the-imagery guy). It’s my works that are ten years old that sell. It takes people time to get used to them, it seems. It’s curious. I think that may be so for many artists (not counting the purely commercial who are pumping out works to fill the living room decor needs of the nation). And of course, the artist has the same problems of paying bills at the end of the month. It’s a double edged sword.
In all that, it’s a miracle that new work emerges. It’s the artist who moves forward his vision from ordinary to extraordinary, who leaps the bounds of convention, who changes the direction of the norm and finds new ways of “speaking” to their viewers. Without their dedication to express themselves in exploratory ways, we would still be back in the chocolate-box works of the the 19th Century. Instead, we’ve been able to absorb some pretty challenging work – Impressionists, Abstract Impressionists, Pop artists, installation artists, post-modernists, Each of those movements was unacceptable when it emerged.
Our all-time example of this is van Gogh. Couldn’t sell a painting in his life-time, but is worth multi-millions now that he’s dead. Strange isn’t it?
So much for philosophy. I haven’t thought this through a lot. It’s too early in the morning for me.
I hope your exhibition is very successful. I think your imagery is beautiful!
K
#7 by suburbanlife on August 7, 2011 - 4:43 pm
Hi MDW – I have been following this discussion between you and LFB. Most interesting, but maybe does not address the core of your concern with “imagery” that you are attracted to and which you feel compelled to investigate.
It seems to me that you are drawn by the stillness and present mass of the grave markers, perhaps by the fact that details of them “name” a possessor of the little plot of earth the deceased persons occupy. Your photo suggests a slice of a streetscape, from the city of the dead. Sort of the “suburb” of the dead with the little areas of tended landscaping – the lawn. Now, a mausoleum, containing several members and generations of a family or dynasty might be construed as an “estate”, where a memorial wall of urns within a cemetery complex, complete with decoratively contained cremated remains, one might think of as an “apartment complex” for the dead. Just as much as domiciles of the living hint at socio-economic status, so do those of the dead.
Plus, graveyards reveal scads of information about a particular culture’s attitudes about living, about desire for being important and immortal.
As Kristin elaborates on what is considered salesworthy or worthy of hanging on one’s wall, images which promote thinking about death and personal impermanence are not necessarily those which are desired by many “art” buyers – and I use the term “art” loosely.
If the main role of art were to provide decoration and a pleasant diversion from the “stuff of life”, and a refusal to entertain thoughts about the realities of living amd being, then making images of graveyards, skulls, memento mori, environmental wastelands are definitely out. And yet – look at the unflinching photographs Edward Burtinsky makes – he does not have to contrive, merely to record, as technically and as judiciously as his artist’s eye permits.
In the case of your own works, since you are interested in photographing architectural images, and you have made a connection between gravestones and buildings, what a rich vein you have discovered for yourself to continue mining as a photographer. The underlying principle of what grave and habitable constructions have in common are something you might be able to juxtapose and uncover some rich truth in, which in the end might attract buyers with a higher demand of art than it’s “beauty” – add “truth” – as in “beauty and truth”, and you’ll have something rich to offer as an artist.
Now, there is never any guarantee of making riches of your oeuvres, or garnering fame. But who knows – if you till that particular field long enough, consistently enough and with obsessive passion, you may?
#8 by lookingforbeauty on September 18, 2011 - 8:27 am
Weighing in again…
I love it when a thread of comments turns out to be so rich.
I appreciate Suburban Life’s point of view. She has a quirky and rich analytical mind that brings much to the conversation. I especially liked the idea of funereal ‘Estates” and “apartment blocks”. Very funny and oh, so apt!
K