Death

p.giannakis said:
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Death, and endless love.
 
Photographing cemeteries is, well, a sensitive issue with many.

Most people I know fear death. They have so many connotations about death and dying, that even the mention of this makes them anxious. Or they prefer to ignore it altogether. Showing photos of cemeteries to my friends requires some considered thought. Some would like them, some would be polite, many would either shy away or run off. It's a delicate matter.

Obviously not a choice dinner party topic, but as a wishy-washy Buddhist (as I find many Westerners tend to be, as it is basically an old philosophical religion for Asian minds of long-past centuries) it has taken me many years and much a and no end of reflection (I'm lousy at meditation, my brain is too active) and ceasing my tendency to overthink all things, to accept the fact that we are all transitory on this planet (which we are now busily destroying, but let's not go there now) and many things happen in life over which we have no control or very little control at best.

How this relates to photography, of course, is that while I am a keen student of old cemeteries, notably colonial graveyards in Asia, I am always highly selective as to who I show these images to. A decade ago I had a folder of my best photos in my (now long closed) business web site, but with a polite warning on the folder that the contents could be "distressing" to some. Nobody complained, but almost nobody looked at my (almost entirely architectural) imagery of graves and graveyards either, which may well say it all.

This, and in my decades of taking stock I have yet to sell an image of a cemetery.

One of my favorite walking places when I'm in Australia is the Melbourne General Cemetery, a splendid place for me to do my carefully composed architectural images of (mostly Italian) family tombs and old mausoleums. Now and then I meet students from local photo schools who are there, busily making images for their study portfolios. I have to say nobody has ever shown me one of such portfolios. Likely after all those hopefuls graduate and go forth into the real world, those photos are all put away and quickly forgotten.

All these thoughts written, this thread has some quite splendid images of "those places". Kudos to those who have posted.
 
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DownUnder said:
This, and in my decades of taking stock I have yet to sell an image of a cemetery.
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I did a brisk trade in images of Prague’s Jewish Cemetery in the 1990s, both in silver chloride and platinum contact prints. I always wondered what people did with them, but I sold dozens, maybe hundreds.
DownUnder said:
One of my favorite walking places when I'm in Australia is the Melbourne General Cemetery, a splendid place for me to do my carefully composed architectural images of (mostly Italian) family tombs and old mausoleums. Now and then I meet students from local photo schools who are there, busily making images for their study portfolios. I have to say nobody has ever shown me one of such portfolios. Likely after all those hopefuls graduate and go forth into the real world, those photos are all put away and quickly forgotten.
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I like most cemeteries, and make a point of going to the Waverley Cemetery in Sydney when I have time. It’s quite a thing to have a cemetery on a cliff above the ocean.

I have photographed a funeral on several occasions. That’s an interesting job. Makes weddings look easy.

Marty
 
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No name on the headstone, in Celigny, on the shore of Lake Geneva.

A fragment of 'Ulysses' by Tennyson:

“Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.”
 
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