Fall Frolic

This weekend was my first showing at Fall Frolic Autumn Festival in Milford, PA.  I sold a few pieces but even more fun than that, several shop owners want to put my photography up for consignment.  A friend also told me to that I should ask places like the Hava Java to put them up.  They like to showcase local art.  Best of all, just about everyone who looked at the portfolio said I had an incredible eye.  That made me feel good.  Like perhaps they see what I saw and saw that it was worthy of capturing.

One gentleman said he had never seen children used in this form of photography and thought the way my kids were depicted were stunning (another YAY!).  He said few people like to equate the beauty of young life with the ugliness of death however my photographs show the beauty of both together.  Much coolness.

While I might not have "sold out" of invetory, I think I made a good first impression and was able to start making some contacts.  I feel good.  Now I just have to drive back up Raymonskill Road and hit those hill side Revolutionary graveyards.

Mountain Graveyard by Robert Morgan

Mountain Graveyard by Robert Morgan
Spore Prose

stone      notes
slate       tales
sacred    cedars
heart     earth
asleep    please
hated     death

I am very fond of this poem.  Others that we read evoked responses but this one connected more so than the others.  I find cemeteries to be very quiet but very hard places.  There is really no conversation or stories other than what the markers say and often that is very little.  It could be just a name, a title such as "mother" or short epitaphs.  In my experience, the funny limerick-like epitaphs or poetic epitaphs are very rare.  I have seen very few myself.  Since the markers themselves say very little and are compacted into just a few words (or one for that matter) I thought this poem and its style very appropriate for the subject matter.  It is compact and though says very little using words; it echoes the Spartan feeling of graveyards.  I also like the title.  "Mountain Graveyard" evokes the image of upright gravemarkers jutting out of a small mountain or hill.  Perhaps only one family buried there.  Graveyards often have older tombstones that are decrepit.  It is probably sneaked under trees; perhaps not in rows to accommodate the "cedars" the poem mentions.  I think if the title was "cemetery" or "memorial garden" the reader would imagine something a bit more orderly.  A resting place with statuary, neat rows of tombstones, a caretaker weedwacking and mowing the grass.  A "Mountain Graveyard" sounds wild and unkempt and a place to put, perhaps all the loved ones in a family.  If they are all of one family, they might indeed hate death.  Death is horrible to all, but to go to a graveyard and see ALL of your relatives in one place might be difficult.

Image is from the Worthington Collection; Thomas Chew Worthington III, Maryland

Cemetery Ethics? Ethics of the dead?

There is an old saying that the minute you give up looking for something desperately it will show up.  Well, they did.  I have been frantic lately trying to find the first cemetery photos I ever took.  It was maybe 14 years ago and my ex-husband and I were in New Orleans.  We took the St. Louis #1 tour and found Lafayette Cemetery on our own. We had visited over All Saint's Weekend so the work, cleaning, decorating and visiting was going on strong.  There were also a great deal of fresh graves in Lafayette. (Yeah, that's me 15 years ago at Marie Laveau's tomb). 

So that leaves me with an ethical question of my own and my justification. One our first trip to New Orleans we, as I said, took the St. Louis #1 cemetery tour (and I always put #1 in the title because there are 3 St. Louis Cemeteries in New Orleans).  These are the "Cities of the Dead;" Necropoleis. When visiting the first tomb ever in St. Louis #1 the corner had broken open.  I don't remember if it was natural or vandalism but I took a peak and saw the bones.  The tombs in New Orleans are above ground because New Orleans is below sea level.  Things have a habit of washing up after hurricanes and rain storms and as our tour guide said, it was possible to see "Uncle Fred floating down the street."  The tombs are also above ground because they act as ossuaries.  A family tomb that has three "shelves" can have dozens of corpses.  City ordinance states that a body must be entombed for two years before a new family member can be deposited.  If the decomposition isn't complete and the body can't be pushed back or dropped down onto the ground of the vault then the body is temporarily houses elsewhere until the two years is up. Decomposition is faster in hot and humid New Orleans.

So what would anyone do when they saw a tomb that was cracked open?  Hell, they'd drop their camera in on the QT and snap a picture.  Yes.  That's what I did.  Do I feel bad about it?  Then, not at all.  Now?  Maybe a little.  I don't think it was very respectful.  The tombs themselves are there for the viewing of friends, loved ones, and strangers. The bones themselves are for no one's viewing other than relatives, anthropologists, those in the funerary/cemetery business and the law.  Am I going to post the picture? Yes, I will.  But I will not sell it.  I don't suspect I'd ever do that again but then again I could be tempted...just as I sneaked a peak down into a hole in the dirt under a large flat slab style tomb (it was just a rabbit hole). Hey, I get tempted.  After all, I'm only a lowly "breather." 

“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” Thornton Wilder

The Bone Church

For those who don't know, an ossuary is a place to store human remains.  In areas where there is little room for continual burial, bodies are buried temporarily in the ground and dug up years later after they've decomposed to the bone.  The bones, which can fit more compactly, are placed, stacked, organized in ossuaries.  Ossuaries can be buildings, boxes, wells, or chests...of any size.

One of the most famous ossuaries is the Sedlec Ossuary, better known as "The Bone Church."  Sedlec is located beneath the Roman Catholic Church of All Saints in the Czech Republic.  In 1278 Henry the Abbot of the Cistercian Monastery was sent to the Holy Land by King Otakar II if Bohemia.  Henry returned with a container of dirt from Golgotha and sprinkled it all over the cemetery.  Word spread that it was really holy ground and everyone wanted to be buried there.  In 1511 the below ground population was out of control and according to legend, the task of removing and arranging the bones fell to a half blind monk.  In 1870, after numerous rebuilds throughout the ages, Frantisek Rint was hired to put the bones in order.  The Bone Church is the result.

So, aside from it being interesting and perhaps to some...morbid, I think The Bone Church is probably one of the greatest statements about the fear of death.  There are between 40,000 and 70,000 bodies in Sedlec.  While an incredible number, it is the disinterment and decorative use of the bones that speaks volumes.  We try to hide death. We codify it.  We dismiss it.  We whisper it.  Our society no longer considers the words "died" or "dead" polite.  Someone "passed on" or "coded" or "slipped away." You can use any euphemism you can but dead is dead.  We paint our corpses and put them in beds so they look like they're sleeping.  We even put their glasses on even though their eyes are sewed shut.   It's clean.

Sedlec Ossuary puts it right out there in front of you.  You can't escape it.  The bones look at you and you look at the bones.  What do you think they think about you?

Society thinks those who honor or are infatuated with the idea of death are "freaks."  They are "goths."  They are "morbid" and "sick."  We find death rituals from around the world distasteful because most of them either deal directly with the body having no professional mediator, or celebrate those who have died and remember them in what Americans might call "morbid" ways (such as leaving a dish of food on the grave for the dead to eat).  People need to remember that it was not more than only 60 or 70 years ago that we lay the dead out on our kitchen tables and the family would wash down and prepare the body.  Sometimes even taking photos (and I'll talk about Post-Mortem photography later).

Sedlec embraces the fear.  It embraces the morbidity. It makes you look at it directly. It makes you realized that we are all the same on the inside.  We are all going to end up the same way.  As a Catholic Church, I cannot believe that Sedlec leaves the follower unaffected.  It speaks of the Christian God and most likely steels the faith of His believers.  To those not of a Abrahamic Faith it probably affects others in a much different way.  Perhaps revealing personal spiritual questions of the self.  Is there a soul?  Where do we go after death?  I have my theories and beliefs but they are my own.  The only thing we really know is what the body reverts to when it stops living.  Everything else is up to interpretation, belief, faith, debate and reason.  The skeleton is fact.

For more information, please visit the official Sedlec Ossuary.

A child's foot

While putting together my portfolio for The Fall Frolic I noticed that there are quite a lot of children's bare feet.  All of the child angels and the likenesses of children are bare footed.  When I was taking photographs of Madeline I had considered putting her in frilly socks but decided against it.  It wasn't so much to "match" the angels or to create some sort of visual associations.  It has to do with perfection. Children are not corrupted by societal norms.  Why should they wear shoes?  It is not the way they were created and they are all born perfect.  What is perfection and why is it most often used to describe children?  Perhaps it's the Tabula rasa. The idea that all newborns are blank slates therefore in some way smooth and flawless.  If children die without any physical/mental/spiritual exposure they remain perfect.  They remain as nature intended them to be.  They remain shoeless.

I remembered a poem by Pablo Neruda.  It is my favorite.  It's rather long so I'll only post the first and last stanza.  Here's a link to the whole poem: To the Foot From It's Child.

To the Foot From Its Child
By Pablo Neruda, translated by Jodey Bateman
(First Stanza)
A child's foot doesn't know it's a foot yet
And it wants to be a butterfly or an apple
But then the rocks and pieces of glass,
the streets, the stairways
and the roads of hard earth
keep teaching the foot that it can't fly,
that it can't be a round fruit on a branch.
Then the child's foot
was defeated, it fell
in battle,
it was a prisoner,
condemned to live in a shoe.

(Last Stanza)
And then it went down
into the earth and didn't know anything
because there everything was dark,
it didn't know it was no longer a foot
or if they buried it so it could fly
or so it could
be an apple.

Fairview Cemetery: Two Trips

Saturday Justin and I went to Fairview Cemetery.  He was very patient and didn't laugh at me when I had to squat in weird positions to get good shots.  It's a beautiful cemetery.  For those who know the area, this is where General Harry C. Trexler and his wife are buried. 

There are a great deal of angels there but a lot are damaged.  One of the largest is missing both an arm and her head.  One small angel is missing a wing.  A bench was knocked over as well.  I hate graveyard vandalism horribly but then am also torn because these damaged statues provide interesting images.  I just tell myself it is time damage even though I know it is not.

The ground is sinking in quite a few places and at least two slab style graves are starting to cave a bit.  This makes it incredibly important NOT to walk in front of a tombstone where a body is buried.  Most of the old caskets were wood.  As the wood rots it collapses inward.  If you're standing on that area...down you go.  It's not nice.  My foot sank a bit along the corner of the slab grave.  In the morning I'm going to call the caretaker and tell him/her which tombs are starting to degrade a bit.

I took Maddie and Reilley with me on the second visit.  I found a very frilly sort of Victorian child's dress and took some shots with her and some of the angels.  It may seem morbid but I am drawn to the children's graves the most. Perhaps because of my own past.  Maybe because such care was taken to remember these souls that were only on this earth for such a brief moment; not even a blink.  Looking at the names, the dates, the ages, just the ones marked "Our Baby" with no name gives them immortality.

"The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most: we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long."
- William Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.325

My six year old and I visit a boneyard

This will probably bore most but Maddie and I had such a good time this morning I wanted to share it.  We left early so we could have the morning light and so it was cooler.  Oddly enough, Maddie was excited to see the graves.  She knows about "death" in that the body stops working.  We bury the body for "rest" and the soul goes to where it's happiest.  She read a good deal of the stones (names, wars, etc...) on her own and loved the statues.  She knew not to step on the stones and to try and avoid stepping on the space in front of the stones.  She picked little flowers (wild cornflowers, dandelions, clover flowers) and put them on really old graves because they didn't have any and no one comes to visit them.  She also helped pick up some random bottle and garbage when she saw it (she pointed it out and I picked it up...no dirty hands for the kiddie). We also repaired a Civil War marker.  It unscrewed and the flag fell.

 We met the caretaker.  He was a nice man named Bob and he shared a good deal of history with us.  There is a section for the children who died of a died of an influenza epidemic.  He told me where to find the first grave dug in 1856.  He showed us where the only Congressional Medal of Honor recipient was located.  He gave permission for grave rubbings but he asked that if a grave is in really poor shape to use my discretion.

 It was a really nice morning and I want to do it again.  I really need to go back because you can't investigate every gravestone with a six year old that has had enough.  You can only look at so much in an hour and a half and my camera ran out of batteries before I could finish.  I need to go back and do macro work.