Cemeteries - why?

I have been photographing the one in my neighborhood for the last 5 years. It is very historical, many famous people buried there, and it is the only active cemetery on Manhattan Island. Trinity Church purchased the property from the estate of John James Audobon. He is buried there as well. After hours, a lot of Santeria rituals take place there.

http://www.pbase.com/keithbg/trinity_church_cemetery&page=all

I was hired to photograph the renovation of the 2nd Portugese Jewish Cemetery - Shearith Israel. It is the oldest Jewish congregation in New York, dating from 1654. Some images can be found here - http://www.pbase.com/keithbg/shearith_israel&page=all
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Yes, they still do... I've been there three times in recent years, and I've found and talked with people of all kinds and ages... Usually there's whiskey around, so the last time I brought some! It was raining the last time, and all the people were still there, enjoying the rain, talking about Jim and toasting, and singing "...my only friend, the end..."

Both in Pere Lachaise and Montparnasse cemeteries you can find everything...

Chopin's small and discreet place is always full of tons of colorful flowers and sweet and delicate fans. The only time I visited Baudelaire, there was a really stupid unknown guy posing for a video camera man, combing his hair, putting a face of I'm so interesting and that's why in my song videoclip I have Baudelaire in the background... Everybody was shocked or smiling... I think even the video crew were laughing at him... Amazing!
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Ya know! I'm not suprised because Morrison's music lives on! It would be fab to be so super, filthy rich to fly about in my personal lear jet to photograph these famous & even not so famous graves. How sic is that!:cool:
 
Photography is about light, shade texture, form, composition, etc., etc. These are also present in cemeteries. For a photography teacher to summarily reject photos of certain subjects, seems wrong to me. Just saying.
 
Ah, but there is the rub IMHO...I shoot what I connect with and the resulting image, good or bad, holds meaning with me. I never shoot without emotion attached.

So, is it bad for an instructor to be selective in what he teaches or allows? No, not in the least. As an adjunct at Georgia Tech for years, I always had to be selective in my material and in what was brought in to be graded. That is just part of teaching.

Do I like photos of pets? Absolutely, but I do not see why anyone would be offended if pet photos were not allowed as part of a course. Or any other subject matter as it is up to the discretion of the one teaching. But, again, that is just me.
 
I REQUIRE my photo students to photograph the cemetery near the university and I photograph my pets too.

This semester one of my students did an extraordinary photo essay on her pet chickens.

I talk to my students about what a photographic cliché is.
 
What a coincidence. Tomorrow (Sunday) is Decoration Day at both my family cemetery and my wife's. We put flowers on the graves of my family yesterday and on the graves of my wife's family today. Decoration Days usually occur on various Sundays in the spring throughout the south, not so sure about other parts of the US. At least 90% of my cemetery photography has been the simple recording of names and dated on family headstones. It's easier than writing it all on a piece of paper and it's easier for me to keep up with.
For the record, there is a coon dog cemetery in northwest Alabama. It has become somewhat of a tourist attraction. Good hunting dogs are respected in these parts.
 
dave lackey said:
<snip> All of the above is why I do not care for cemeteries. A part of life? No, it is death. I cannot salvage good from anything related to a cemetery. I have seen too much waste in my time.

I prefer to drink my water from a flowing well than to drink from a stagnant pond. But that's just me.:)

The reason for the post is the my wonderment at the fascination of the dead. BTW, as a former architect, cemeteries are not it for me.
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I love cemeteries but seldom photograph there. The only cemetery photo I have done that I liked was of a gravedigger.

And it is not fascination with the dead. I come from a family that has always believed when you die, there is nothing left but the physical remains of what once held that person's existence. All of my family has been cremated and ashes disposed.

My fascination with cemeteries is the historical information about the long gone people. Study the grave markers closely and you can learn a lot about those there. Last year, in a small remote cemetery in south Alabama, I discovered I have ancestors that came from London England in 1635. Previously we though we just were country people from south Alabama.

So I will never pass up an old local small cemetery. Not to take photos but to learn about the cultures that used to be there.
 
Bob Michaels said:
I come from a family that has always believed when you die, there is nothing left but the physical remains of what once held that person's existence.
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Interesting, Bob... No one on that family ever considered the existence of (parents apart) another being as responsible at least in part for their existence, or even themselves in a wish to learn, before being born? A whole family, seems crowdy, and makes me remember religious obstinacy... Not a single black sheep?

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Interesting, Bob... No one on that family ever considered the existence of (parents apart) another being as responsible at least in part for their existence, or even themselves in a wish to learn, before being born? A whole family, seems crowdy, and makes me remember religious obstinacy... Not a single black sheep?

Cheers,

Juan
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Juan: what I was trying to convey is the thought that none of us assign any significance to the physical remains. It is just the left overs. We love the departed members of our families and miss them. Some family members are traditional Christian, some support some view of spirituality, some are just agnostic. We all celebrate the lives of those who are no longer alive but no one goes to cemeteries to visit corpses of those who died before cremation became possible.

And we are all organ donors. Anything good, including medical research, that can come from our corpses after we die is worthwhile.
 
A gravestone in Lamington, New Jersey. The cemetery holds the remains of approximately 90 African Americans dating back to before the civil war. About 60 of the interred are unidentified. Some of these folks were free blacks and others were former slaves. About ten of them fought for the Union in the Civil War. This headstone is for a Mr. Martin King. The cemetery is on the National Register of Historic Places, which is fortunate, as Donald Trump built a golf course just up the road from this spot. The golf course is built on land that once belonged to John DeLorean; the property had been a horse farm. Trump rerouted a road. All the roads in the area immediately around the cemetery are dirt, an unusual thing in this part of NJ.

I imagine that folks buried here would be shocked to see what has become of their surroundings in the past century and a half or more. Why do I make photos in cemeteries? I have no idea, other than the history of the people in them and the artwork adorning a few of their grave markers fascinates me.

Bob Michael's image of the gravedigger is such a powerful photo, that I can understand why he chooses not shoot more cemetery images. That one says all that needs to be said.

I first noticed this marker for Mr. King several years ago, having bicycled to this area on, of all days, Martin Luther King Day. No doubt, this Mr. King and that Mr. King are unrelated, but the irony of finding the one on the day celebrating the life and work of the other has stuck with me.

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this next shot will correct some of the factual errors in my narrative above...
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tbarker13 said:
Cemeteries are just another part of life. With that in mind, I don't know they wouldn't be worthy of photography - like pretty much everything else.
I don't shoot a lot in cemeteries, mainly because I'm never all that happy with shots I get from them. But a couple I do like:

Portmahomack, Scotland

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Photographing cemeteries can be a bit morbid, but they can yield nice results such as the above.

On a similar line of thought, i don't get the fascination of photographing the homeless, or worse yet drug addicts.

Pets can make you smile because they become part of the family.

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Bob Michaels said:
Juan: what I was trying to convey is the thought that none of us assign any significance to the physical remains. It is just the left overs. We love the departed members of our families and miss them. Some family members are traditional Christian, some support some view of spirituality, some are just agnostic. We all celebrate the lives of those who are no longer alive but no one goes to cemeteries to visit corpses of those who died before cremation became possible.

And we are all organ donors. Anything good, including medical research, that can come from our corpses after we die is worthwhile.
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Bob, no position here, A and B are equally strange and familiar to me in several ways. I was not trying to criticize in any way such a personal belief... Just curious about the "all my family always thought..." and not because of the content you expressed, but because of the insistence on it when you included a whole family with no exception... Now you've made it sound less extreme, and have said new and different things too... I wish you a good surprise soon: not the final day surprise, but one a lot sooner: sometimes we can see things that are out of any reason, and those are a blessing, as they show us all we can do is give names to things, but, that sometimes makes us forget the real things, and we start believing just in the names... We were taught the wind blows through the trees and then we hear the sound of air molecules being hit until they reach our ears and brain, and then we feel calm because we understood, and we stop thinking about it, but others were taught to listen to the words said by the wise voice of the trees...

Cheers,

Juan
 
I recall while in Prague that I was told the powers that be were trying to decide what to do with graves of, especially, Germans buried in the Czech Republic whose families had not paid for the upkeep as many had been forced to return to Germany after the war.

I believe in France it is customary that you be buried for only 25 or 50 years, then your place is recycled, unless you are famous. Abelard and Héloise were moved to Pere Lachaise are in no danger of eviction.

In Mexico, my friend tells me some people wish to be buried for say ten years, then have their bones removed to a church.

Of course, the catacombs in the quarries under Paris are full of the bones of people removed from the old cemeteries, they are stacked as in the thigh bones go here, etc. and as I recall, the original cemeteries are noted on the bunch. They searched my camera bag when I left, I guess they thought I might be taking a physical souvenir.

Near Montparnasse there is a pet cemetery, so students in a photo class can break several rules at once?

I really do not "like" contemporary cemeteries, save Lakeview here in Cleveland which I really think mostly of as a park, --- I begin to see too many stones with birth dates after mine.

I have always thought it impolite to step directly on someone's grave.

Perhaps it is more permissible to photograph a grave if someone is buried with their Leica, set on time of course with a bottle of Rodinal thrown in.

Regards, John
 
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