Grave Matters
By Jerry Jackson
29 Jan 2009
I've had an obsession with graveyards since I was a young boy. It all started when my grandfather died and I visited my first cemetery. I was awestruck ... not by the sudden loss of a family member, but by the strange yet beautiful headstones, statues and mausoleums that stood as monuments to those who lived and died before I was even born.
As I grew older I found myself wandering through old graveyards whenever and wherever I had the chance. While I was in college I visited a tomb built for a wealthy family during the Great Depression in Kansas. I often wondered what it must have been like to spend that kind of money on a resting place for the dead when farmers and their families in Kansas were struggling to stay alive during the Dust Bowl. Years later I spent a day exploring Chicago's historic Graceland cemetery and couldn't help but imagine how cool it would be to have a grave next to some of the greatest architects, politicians, and captains of American industry. It seemed that no matter where I went there was a graveyard nearby calling my name.
Over the years I've tried time and time again to capture that sense of awe and peculiar wonder that I felt as a child when I visited that old bone yard in West Virginia and saw the spot where my grandfather would be buried. I've never sat down to do an accurate count, but by my estimation I've photographed at least 15 different cemeteries across the US ... and I've photographed a few of them as many as a dozen different times. That's the thing that always surprises me: No matter how many times I visit a particular graveyard there is always a tomb, gravestone, or statue that I didn't notice before. Every visit to a graveyard is a fresh opportunity to see something in a new way.
I moved to Ohio at the end of 2000 and since then I've visited the Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum in Cincinnati more times than I care to count. I usually go there with one of my trusty cameras and a few "normal" zoom lenses (enough to cover the 35mm-200mm focal lengths). It wasn't until 2008 that I struck an epiphany: If I want to capture that peculiar feeling and sense of wonder I had as a child, maybe I need to use a lens with a peculiar perspective?
I left the "normal" lenses at home and grabbed a 28mm wide angle lens and an 8mm fisheye lens as I jumped into the car and headed for Spring Grove. I spent several hours walking the grounds photographing graves that I've seen more than a dozen times, but this time I was capturing them in a way that I had never done before. On that quiet August morning I felt something that I hadn't felt since I was that little boy visiting his grandfather's resting place. I realized that these monuments of life and death are more than just a final way for the dying to leave their mark on the world. Our graves are a way for us to speak to others long after we're gone ... and maybe, just maybe allow them to see the world in a different way.
