Emotions Evoked by Grave Markers

In September of 2024 I had a show of some of my cemetery photography at Box Spring Gallery in Philadelphia. It was called, “Ghosts.” Nine of my cemetery snow photographs were exhibited. The image you see here was one of the framed photographs.

During the opening reception, there was a woman with her daughter, walking from photo to photo, looking at each piece. I overheard their conversation in front of this one. The mom asked the girl, who was maybe six years old, “What emotion do you feel when you look at this?” The girl said, “I feel cold.”

The mom then said something like, “I feel cold too, but when I look into her eyes, everything seems to get warmer and the snow begins to melt away.” What an amazing observation. Very personal.

Because this statue has human-like qualities, it becomes easier to assign human characteristics to it. And so maybe it becomes easier to react to it in some emotive way. Annette Stott points out in her paper “Personhood and Agency: A Theoretical Approach to Gravemarkers in Mainstream American Cemeteries,”1 that there are various kinds of cemetery monuments ranging from those that bear no resemblance to a human being, to those that recall the human shape. These gravemarkers guarantee the deceased’s continued visibility into a distant future and bring new life to the person’s emplaced and re-bodied identity. 

That last line is a mouthful, but what she means is that long after the buried body has disintegrated, the gravemarker becomes a physical substitute for that person. If said gravemarker has a human form, it is that much easier to relate to it as the actual deceased person. 

Observers seem to find meaning in the images I make, probably different from the meaning or feeling the statue was originally intended to invoke. I try not to define these photographs. I’m usually surprised by peoples’ observations. I dislike giving the photographs titles, because that can very easily define a piece. The one at top is called “Denizen.” Kind of vague, right? Almost meaningless. That’s my intent. I would much rather the viewer find personal meaning in the work, as the mom did above.

Many of the images in the show were cemetery statues and all of them were photographed in the snow. They were challenging to make, since it was cold, windy, and sometimes snowing as I plodded through various cemeteries. So there is a story behind each piece, but I’m not there to recreate that for all viewers. That’s why I need each individual piece to stand on its own. Artists are sometimes urged to write an “Artist’s Statement” for an exhibit, to help put the work in perspective for the viewer. Sometimes this helps, sometimes not. As I said, I don’t really want to define everything for the observer. After they purchase a piece and live with it a few months or years, perhaps it will take on new meanings.

Artist Statement: A Frozen Elegy

Through the lens of a camera, cemeteries in the snow reveal a frozen elegy, where silence and solitude merge to create a visual ode to the eternal cycle of existence. The unpredictability of nature challenges me to create images that capture the ephemeral beauty of the moment.

A snow-covered landscape transforms cemeteries into a surreal and hauntingly beautiful realm. The soft white blanket conceals the intricate details of tombstones, creating a minimalist aesthetic that accentuates the stark contrasts between calm and suffering, between life and death.

There is something very intimate about being in a snow-covered cemetery by yourself. Leaving one’s footsteps in silence serves as a reminder of the shared human experience of mourning, remembrance, and the fact that life does, in fact, go on.

When I wrote the statement above, I was thinking more about the experience of making the photographs, and I hadn’t thought about the monuments, the statues, the tombstones themselves. The mom’s comments drew me back to the stones. 

At the time of the exhibit, I was finishing up a new book I’m writing called, “Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs,” and Stott’s comments kept coming back to me as I wrote about one abandoned cemetery after another. Her paper addresses the power that a gravemarker has over us. A stone is just a stone until a name and date are carved into it. Then it begins to take on an identity. When it is placed on a grave, it simply marks the spot where that person’s bones are buried. A century later, the bones are dust and the coffin probably disintegrated. At that point, when we look out over a cemetery filled with hundred-year-old gravestones, we see them as person substitutes. We don’t think of them all as simply marking the graves where the people are buried.

So to look back at a face in the snow and breathe life into it is not an unusual reaction. Many people have had some visceral response to a gravestone, a statue, a monument. Sometimes the encounter elicits an emotion that we have no name for. Stott does a wonderful job explaining why we react to gravemarkers the way we do.

“One way people demonstrate their humanity to themselves is through grave marking, an activity no other living being seems compelled to do.” – Annette Stott

The fact that the curator of the Box Spring Gallery, Gaby Heit, came up with the title “Ghosts,” for the exhibit was fortuitous. It made me think that the people buried beneath these stones are now nothing more than ghosts – the stone is all that is left. As there are probably no people still alive who even remember the deceased whose graves these stones mark, the stones may be the only tangible evidence left that these people even existed. They are truly, as Stott calls them, “person substitutes.” And because of that we react to them differently than we would to an unmarked stone found on a mountainside, for example.

Stott calls this “agency.” Art objects like grave markers have agency in that they are representative of the deceased, yes, but they can act as a surrogate, an “agent” for the deceased. The statue in the top photo, the denizen of some particular cemetery, is also bonded to that particular cemetery. All things equal, it will always be there, and only there. A sobering, if not chilling remark Stott makes is that:

“Gravestones designate a border between life and death, body and spirit, by marking the place on earth where the body is hidden from sight permanently.” – Annette Stott

So perhaps that is one reason we get a funny feeling when we look at a tombstone or monument in a cemetery - it brings to mind our own mortality. We see that border between life and death - our life, and eventually, our death. 

REFERENCES

1. Stott, A “Personhood and Agency: A Theoretical Approach to Gravemarkers in Mainstream American Cemeteries,” Association for Gravestone Studies, Markers Vol. XXXV, Sterling, 2019