Frigid Cemetery Photography

Sitting here typing away on a Saturday morning, waiting for tomorrow’s expected blizzard. I’m between catastrophes, so I have some time to gather my thoughts. These past three weeks of frigid temperatures have taken their toll on my friends and neighbors, who suffered burst pipes, floods, and fires. Over the years, I’ve had my turn in the barrel so I feel fortunate that my biggest challenge right now is where to park my car tonight so that it will be easy to dig out tomorrow. Might need to hit a cemetery in the snow.

The fluffy stuff has slowly begun to melt. I am looking forward to wearing regular shoes. Its been so damned cold with the snow and ice that took weeks to go away, I’d had to wear boots everywhere. Including last weekend’s trip to a couple of cemeteries.

1855 Gatehouse, Mount Moriah Cemetery, Philadelphia

The previous Saturday morning was spent at the volunteers meeting in Philadelphia’s Mount Moriah Cemetery – two hours of meeting time with my toes frozen in the old office building. This ended with a rousing demonstration by a falconer with her owl and hawk - indoors! I often tell people that I do not have normal friends. Normal bores the daylights out of me (to paraphrase the Stones). Prior to that, I killed a bit of time in Lansdowne, PA’s Fernwood Cemetery, a couple miles up the road. I did some frigid photography there.

Stark, raving cold.

In Fernwood, it was 14 degrees with a 45 mph wind. Who knew what the wind chill was (-13 degrees, I think). I figured shooting would be limited as I wasn’t going to be jumping out of the car much. In an ice-covered cemetery, its difficult to compose your masterpiece while you’re trying hard not to fall on your ass. So, a zoom lens and a camera out the car window was my plan. Being out there at the mercy of nature is terrifying but cathartic. 

It was colder than Christmas. Roads were plowed throughout the property, which was quite a feat, actually. If you had not plowed and shoveled the day those nine inches of snow fell weeks ago on January 25th (2026), there was no way to do that a day hence. The sleet and ice that followed solidified the concretion so that nothing could penetrate. Roads and sidewalks everywhere in the Philadelphia area were treacherous for the next three weeks. So why not attempt to navigate some cemetery ice fields?

Far from spring, plastic flowers punctuate the ice fields

As much as I’d like to disagree with Joan Didion when she says that happiness is a consumption ethic, I would not be driving around in an ice-covered cemetery in frigid weather if the built landscape was not there. These monuments are a very obvious form of consumerism, and maybe because of that I find this landscape much more interesting than a field of flowers or a sunset on the bay. To paraphrase the Stones again, let’s do some living after they’ve died.

Looks like one of those old Victorian etchings of a cemetery, right?

However, when you can’t open the car door due to the insane wind gusting across the permafrost, you begin to question your life choices. Torrents of powdery snow in the low contrast landscape seemed like a fast-moving fog monster. BUT, you can always power-wind the windows down to shoot, right? Except – the passenger window stuck about four inches down! I could hear the winding motor straining inside the door. Cold! Snow blowing inside! Fumbled quickly with the electric window lock switch, thinking that I had hit that by accident! But no, the window seemed stuck. I hit the rocker switch both up and down, back and forth, but the window just fidgeted. Like an idiot, I hit the driver’s side window switch to see if that would go down. I was torn between getting the windows open in order to shoot some photos, and having them stuck open.

Silhouette snowscape, Fernwood Cemetery

Fear Factor Fernwood: Now the driver’s side window is also stuck open about four inches and I’m getting pelted with snow! I’m in a sound bath of a howling gale! Prayed to all the known gods - you know, those gods you pray to when you realize in the morning that you left your wallet on the seat of your car overnight?

I put the RAV in gear and quickly drove down the hill toward the community mausoleum, thinking the building would break the wind. I wonder if Andrew Wyeth ever experienced this sort of thing when he would drive to a snowy location in his vehicle, break out his paints, and create a painting on a canvas propped on his dashboard? According to his granddaughter, Victoria Wyeth, her grandfather loved the snow and would have driven right out to capture the beauty of the world after a storm. Absently, I hit the window rocker switches and both windows motored up and closed. Thanks Andy.

Deep sea diver in the snow, Fernwood Cemetery, Lansdowne, PA

I ended up with some images from Fernwood that I really like, some of which you see here. The color images seem less cold than the black and whites, but they do make you feel all the feels, right? I drove around a bit more but didn’t risk getting out or rolling down the windows. This final image was shot through my windshield as a sort of frozen fog enveloped my vehicle like some past-life regression. I finished typing this up on a Saturday, and then Sunday night into Monday, our area has another snowstorm planned. Guess where I’m going Monday after work? So many cemeteries, so little time.

A Cautionary New Year’s Tale Involving Cemeteries (the Non-ChatGPT Version!)

Whether you’re spending New Years’ Day visiting a premature baby in an ICU or waiting for your mom to die in hospice, you can’t help but wonder what the new year will bring. You hope its good – or at least as good as it can get. Life can be like standing in a graveyard while its snowing – you’re surrounded by death, but then something may soften the idea. You feel that newfallen snow brings the idea of new life, a fresh start.

So instead of an all-night tears-of-the-moon rain tonight, snow is forecast. The group of cemetery photographers I had planned to hang with tomorrow backed out due to the expected snow and icy conditions. But that’s why God created the SUV, am I right? Back when I drove Saab convertibles, I would’ve found myself begging off as well. But seeing as I have an SUV, I will be out there tomorrow morning in the snow. Supposedly it will still be falling in the morning. This will make my inner child very happy.

I have a go-to cemetery for snow days, with lots of angel statues and other monuments, so hopefully I’ll have some images to post with this piece. Make hay while the sun shines, they used to say. Or as an eighty-year-old woman told me yesterday, “have fun and enjoy yourself while you’re in your sixties and seventies!” Weird, but true. She said all your kids have grown, they have their own lives, and you can just go out and have fun. While its true that most of our knowledge of the world is vicarious, I hoped to meet some of my own snow ghosts to haunt my dreams.

And haunt me they did. I always figured that if I didn’t believe in them, they wouldn’t try to get me. But that does not always work. For instance, I was raised Catholic, twelve years of good-versus-evil Bible squitter. Then a couple weeks ago, I started reading a book my friend George loaned me, by Randall Sullivan, called The Devil’s Best Trick (2024, Atlantic Monthly Press). The trick is that the devil has convinced us that he’s not real. 

I began reading the book in bed. Read about twenty pages, and put it beside my pillow and went to sleep. What I read had not been scary. The book is comprised mainly of historical accounts, exorcisms, and the author’s experiences. I awoke from a really disturbing nightmare. Something dark was slowly flapping its wings as it sat on a sort of altar inside a sort of church. Really nothing more to it than that, other than the feeling of intense evil. I tried going back to sleep, but was too wired. I took the book from beside my pillow and threw it under my bed. I fell asleep just fine.

Maybe the snow tomorrow will white-out some of the evil surrounding us these days. At least until it melts and things resume looking shitty again. Slowly, the dirty soil bleeds into the white snow. But a lot of that is perception, right? When Victoria Wyeth gave a recent talk on how her grandfather Andy painted snow, she presented four categories, something like, flurries, footprints, melting snow, and dirty snow. The dirty snow intrigued me. She explained how the soil’s brown colors were drawn up and absorbed by the snow, changing its colors in subtle ways. It had gone far from being simply “dirty” snow – now it was snow tinged with raw or burnt umber. It really is all in your perception of things, right? So is dirty snow evil, filthy, or just tinged with brown pigment? It’s a perception thing – you need to choose.

Sometimes a misimpression or misunderstanding pays off. Charles Dickens’ misperception of, or rather misreading of, Ebeneezer Scroggie’s tombstone in Scotland’s Canongate Kirk graveyard lead him to believe that Scroggie was “a mean man” - it actually said, “meal man.” Scroggie, it seems, was a successful corn merchant. Dickens conjured up the famous skinflint character Ebeneezer Scrooge based on his idea of what he thought Scroggie was – a mean man. So Dickens’ mistake paid off, obviously. (Ref.)

What then will the new year bring? Misperceptions? Mistakes? Sure. Lean into them, learn from them. Certain experiences can create an artistic epiphany as sometimes happens with snow falling in a graveyard. Maybe you pivot your old way of thinking, like the “ah-ha” moment I had last week when I realized why metal water bottles are so popular. After dragging some women to the new Neil Diamond-themed movie, “Song Sung Blue,” I was about to apologize, thinking they’d found it boring. Then I realized they were drunk and didn’t care. Its been, what, twenty years since metal “water bottles” became a thing? It never occurred to me that anyone would fill them with anything but water. Well, Bob’s your uncle, as the Brits say. Same startling realization as when I found out that the song, "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz is the most famous Jewish song ever. Didn't know that, hmm? Written by two Jewish immigrants about hope, the promised land, and exile.

So after all, it snowed a bit last night, but then turned to freezing rain. The snow was tentative, I realized that. I wasn’t treating the situation like it would be the last dinner on the Titanic. When I went to the cemetery this morning, it was not what I expected, or hoped for. (Really, what is?) Instead of standing inside a calm snow globe that someone had just shaken, I was greeted by icy roads and ice-covered monuments. I spent about two hours trying not to kill myself on the ice and made a few photos while I was at it (much to the amusement of the drivers of the two plow trucks parked on the property). As I grabbed onto the base of a monument to keep myself from falling, I wondered what other purpose these monuments served. 

Why do monuments even exist? Sure, we all know they are meant to memorialize someone or something. In her article, “What monuments stand to teach Americans about themselves,” (Spectator, December 2025) Julia Friedman says that they show us “just how attached we are to grievance…reimagining defeat as victory.” A beautiful angel carved in granite indicates to us that even though the deceased person may have died, they succeeded in being borne aloft by angels to the heavens, and to their eternal reward. Success! Victory over death! Bullfeathers. Would we install a monument on the grave of the hiker who was killed by a mountain lion in Colorado on New Years' Day? 

Fancy cemetery monuments and buildings with your name on them do not define your life – your actions do. Whether you feel like last year was a dumpster fire or the Second Coming, keep in mind what ChatGPT said in my last blog post: cemeteries remind anyone seeking fresh beginnings of an inconvenient truth: Time does not reset. It only continues—and it keeps excellent records.

So for the new year, maybe be more realistic? Be more artistic – add beauty to the world. As the great philosopher Frank Zappa said, the human mind is like a parachute – it works best when its open. Accept your mortality, and that of others. There are so many choices in life that sometimes it looks like a Chinese menu. Buy that dog for your kid. Accept that people lie to you. Accept that people are lying to you every day. In my previous ChatGPT-created post, I lied to you. Maybe do your children a favor and lie to them every once in a while (but point it out shortly afterwards). Explain it to them as a life lesson – people will lie to you, so don’t be like a heifer to the slaughter, as musician Brian Eno sings in “Baby’s on Fire.” Instead of memorializing oneself with an expensive monument, maybe focus on making the world a slightly better place. Otherwise, the new year will suck as badly as the old one. Remember the Devil’s best trick… that the Devil has convinced us that he’s not real. 

I’ll leave you with the last verse of Eno’s “Baby’s On Fire.” Maybe it relates to your life, your job, your nation. Maybe in the new year, we should all show more respect for each other. I’m not expecting perfection, and neither should you. I’ll be happy with a six-seven year.

“But baby's on fire!
And all the instruments agree that
Her temperature's rising
But any idiot would know that”

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

 

Read my previous post, which I authored with the use of ChatGPT,  

"A Cautionary New Year’s Tale Involving Cemeteries:"

http://thecemeterytraveler.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-cautionary-new-years-tale-involving.html

Cemeteries Are Not So Depressing

What is depressing is watching a Thanksgiving Day parade in the rain. Like the one that happened in Philadelphia this year, 2024, and in NYC, to the multi-million-dollar Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Jimmy Fallon’s big smile notwithstanding. I wasn’t even there, I was just watching on television. Depressing watching those people trying to have a good time. I’ve had more fun attending funerals in the rain. 

It's easy for me, a cemetery creeper, to say that, if you’re depressed, go visit a cemetery! Sometimes the world is too much world us, as Wordsworth wrote. Whether it’s during a busy day at work or I’m sitting in my car in the supermarket parking lot watching rats running under a dumpster, I sometimes long to get away – to a cemetery. Quiet and ratless solitude. 

I’ve long felt that there is beauty in the forgotten world of these memory gardens. The absence of distraction allows me to focus, sometimes on nothing in particular. I have fleeting memories of live people whom I’ve met over the years, but I can remember exactly where I made a particular cemetery photograph twenty years ago. I also know that most of my cemetery visits have been fun, and all have been therapeutic. They can be a cushion against the outside world. And those cemetery fences...? 

Originally meant to keep the thoughts of the dead away from those of the living, one can also interpret cemetery fences as demarcations, boundaries of a memory world in which hope and solace reside. Cemeteries can sometimes be more than a cushion for us to relax on, they can be a trampoline for our emotions, our creativity – maybe even our sanity. A private place that most people avoid - in our midst but a world away.

Victoria Wyeth, in her Halloween, 2024, lecture on her family’s artwork (virtual gallery talk sponsored by the Brandywine River Museum in Chaddsford, PA), said that after her grandfather Andrew Wyeth died, she was depressed for months. It was only after her Uncle Jamie flew her to Maine to picnic at her grandfather’s grave, did she experience the calm joy of being in a cemetery.

Victoria and her Uncle Andy (who died in 2009) had been very close, she being his only grandchild. A few months after his death, Jamie Wyeth flew her to Maine where he and Victoria’s Dad took her to the cemetery where Andy was buried. They had a picnic. She said they “turned the cemetery into something that’s not scary.”  Now, whenever she’s sad or something cool happens, she visits the cemetery and talks with her grandfather. She loves that her Dad and Uncle took a situation like that, brought her to a cemetery and made it normal. She went on to say that this interaction with cemeteries is really important, something people tend to avoid.

I used to think that visiting and volunteering to do work in cemeteries was all about respect – respect for the past, and ultimately, respect for ourselves. I now think that respect ties in deeply with memory. Cemeteries are full of memories - maybe not ours, but we can still appreciate them. I volunteer at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. I’ve witnessed people visiting from a thousand miles away, scooting in a motorized wheelchair up a sidewalk cleared by the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Inc., to visit a grandparent who had died forty years earlier. Witnessing other people’s experience with memory can create a profound impression, a not depressing memory.

When I wrote my new book, Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs (due out in 2025 on Fonthill Media), I mention a quote by my friend Ross Mitchell, who at the time I interviewed him in 2006, was the Executive Director of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. I was speaking with him about ways in which an historic cemetery can stay in business (because that’s what cemeteries are, businesses - when they’re full, and can have no new burials, there is no income). 

Laurel Hill, like many cemeteries, hosts events. Sometimes admission is charged, usually donations are requested. Laurel Hill has hosted rock concerts, movie nights, historic tours, running events, classic hearse shows - all to engage the community and create positive memories for the attendees. Such events raise money for the upkeep of the grounds. I asked Ross how he came to terms with people thinking that fund-raising events in a cemetery was disrespectful, an impingement on peoples’ memories. He said: 

“People really need to come here and see Laurel Hill for themselves. They need to overcome their inhibition of ‘why would I want to visit a cemetery’ and realize that not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life. And you talk about, well, isn’t it disrespectful? If you look at the monuments and the sculpture in Laurel Hill you know these people wanted these monuments to be seen.”

There are many reasons to visit a cemetery, you don’t need to be visiting someone who died. There is history, art, architecture - and everything in a cemetery changes with the seasons of the year; things look different whenever you visit. You will witness the embodiment of other peoples’ memories and will come away with your own. While its true that during a brief visit we only get a fleeting glimpse of other peoples’ lives, but this can be enough. 

My friend George Hofmann, in his article, Bipolar Disorder and Memory writes about his memory as he gets older (George actually works in a cemetery) - “Instead of some deep resonance I’m lost in wavering impressions. Impressions can be beautiful. Beauty comes more readily in a forgotten world.” 

In the same article, Hofmann mentions a line from the movie, Nomadland, in which the central character states, “What’s remembered lives.” I have all good memories of cemeteries, even the one where I attended the burial of a friend’s nine-year-old son. Although that day was traumatic, the memory was modified years later, when the Dad took over the care of this cemetery - the prior owner could no longer manage it. So this Thanksgiving season, there are things to be thankful for, like memories. And come to think of it, I’ll bet all those people standing in the rain at this year’s Thanksgiving Day parades came away with good memories.

The last question Victoria Wyeth asked her grandfather before he died, was about how to create the color black. He said that he didn’t start by squeezing inky paint from a tube. “You build in the excitement before adding black, you slowly build it up with blues and reds and greens.” So let’s all make sure that when our screens go black, our lives will remain a colorful memory for those we leave behind - full of blues and reds and greens. When they visit your grave, let them leave with a smile - even if they don't know who you are.

REFERENCES:

Why The Cemetery Is a Celebration of Life:

https://www.stoneangels.net/ross-mitchell-part-8-visiting-laurel-hill-why-the-cemetery-is-a-celebration-of-life/

Virtual Gallery Talk with Victoria Wyeth: Halloween Edition 2024:

https://www.brandywine.org/museum/events/virtual-gallery-talk-victoria-wyeth-halloween-edition-2024-0

America’s First Family of Art:

https://pinestrawmag.com/americas-first-family-of-art/

Falling Snow in the Cemetery

Okay, no more ChatGPT tricks. This is really me writing this. Really. No, wait, how would you know? Hopefully, my personality will suffuse the text to the degree that you’ll be able to tell its really me. I’m interested in my readers’ take on how I compare to AI, so please comment!

I should have named this post, “Falling In the Snow in the Cemetery,” since that’s one of the things that occurred during the recent January snow week while I was shooting cemeteries. But more on that as we slide along. I’ve photographed cemeteries in the snow many times, and recounted those experiences on this blog. Between January, 2022 and January, 2024, I really had no new experiences to recount.

Why is that? Well, it hadn’t snowed in the Philadelphia area in two solid years. We were due, I suppose. Can’t say I missed it all that much – go global warming! But we did recently get dumped on twice in one week – about three inches initially, then about six a few days later. I had a few opportunities to get out there with the cameras, so, Bob’s your chipmunk, as they say.

Old Swedes Church monument, Philadelphia

Early in the week, it snowed all day and I was able to get out to a few South Jersey cemeteries for some shooting before sunset. Actually, I began my snow shooting in the small Old Swede’s Church graveyard near my house in the Queen Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. The church sexton allows people to walk their dogs on the large open area next to the graveyard, and there were about ten dogs frolicking in the snow that morning. One woman had just entered the property and her large dog was pulling her along. She said something like “Slow down, Petey, I know you want to see your friends!”

Ben Franklin's grave, Christ Church Burial Ground (Pennies ...get it?)

Since I work in south Jersey, it was easy enough to visit nearby Harleigh, Old Camden, and Evergreen cemeteries after work. A few days later we had an all-day snow, so I was able to get out into an active snowstorm in Calvary Cemetery, in Cherry Hill. It remained cold for a week so I made the most of the weather by catching lingering snow in Philly’s Christ Church Burial Ground (Old City) as well as the Old Pine Church graveyard (Society Hill) on my way to and from work.

Selfie with friend in Calvary Cemetery, Hill of Cherries, New Jersey

But back to the beginning. The selfie you see of me (above) was made when I first arrived at Calvary. It was colder than a witty analogy. The photo below is me an hour later, after shooting in the piercing wind and trudging through six inches of fresh snow. Photographing cemeteries in a snowstorm can be quite an amazing experience – until its not. It is exhilarating to be out there alone with the elements, knowing full well no one else in their right mind is doing the same. Well, alone except for the groundskeepers plowing the cemetery roads. Probably wondering how unhinged this guy must be in the snow with all those cameras dangling from his neck. 

Jesus, it was cold out there!

As I repeatedly jammed additional “HotHands” chemical hand warmer pouches into my gloves, I kept thinking how I didn’t want to end up like Jack Nicholson in the final scene of “The Shining.” Its one thing to reach the point of self-actualization by getting that one-in-a-million shot, but the need for the safety of a warm vehicle in the dead of winter can knock you down a few pegs on Maslow’s pyramid, where you’re all of a sudden more concerned with basic survival needs. And losing digits.

Ansel Adams, eat your heart out. (Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, NJ)

Granted, this is nothing compared to what Ansel Adams went through to capture those gorgeous images of the snow-covered Rockies in Jellystone Park, or climbing onto his car roof with a tripod and a view camera to shoot, “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico,” but it was challenging enough. Everything’s relative. Adams probably didn’t have a fourteen-year-old daughter at home who needed dinner made when she got home from school. 

Sunset, Evergreen Cemetery, Camden, NJ

Anyhow, that weekend it stayed cold (below freezing), so I spent a few hours trudging through Woodlands Cemetery in west Philly. Mainly I shot with the iPhone and Holga loaded with 120mm black and white film. It was so cold I couldn’t wind the film for the next exposure! (Remember winding film? …. Remember film? …)

Yours truly, with the Holga (Woodlands Cemetery)

The Holga. Yes, just another pain point in my photographic arsenal. A Holga is essentially a cheap plastic toy camera that uses 120mm film. As I write this, I’m waiting for the film processing place to develop my film, scan the negatives, and send them to Dropbox for me. I have no idea whether there will be anything good on that film. Actually I shot two rolls of 12 exposures (120 mm BW). I will wait until I get the results before I post this, so you can all witness either my ineptitude or my genius, whichever the case may be.

Turns out I was rewarded with two reasonable images – out of 24. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut twice a day. Here they are.

Holga images (L: Calvary Cemetery; R: Woodlands Cemetery)

Falling For You

At one point, in a cemetery I won’t name, I slipped on the ice. Wasn’t climbing on a monument. (Honestly, I don’t do that. Having seen a monument fall on a person, pin them to the ground and break their leg, I do avoid such near occasions). I was simply walking along the unplowed road, and my feet flew out from under me! My mind's eye was blind to the ice under the snow. I’d been looking out at the gravestones, eyes peeled for a good composition, instead of looking where I was walking. Obviously, I had not done the proper risk assessment. Hit my right shoulder on the ground with tremendous force:

According to Microsoft’s new AI powered Bing search engine:

"The gravitational force acting on a 200 lb mass is about 889 Newtons. A person who weighs about 200 pounds and falls just 6 feet will hit the ground with almost 10,000 pounds of force."

Calvary Cemetery, Cherry Hill, NJ

And I felt every one of those fekkin 10,000 pounds. Jesus H. Christ! Despite the pain, I made it okay hiking through the cemetery and shot for an hour, but then I realized I couldn’t raise my right arm very high. The next day, I couldn’t raise it at all. I spent the next week with T. Rex arms. Really thought I tore my rotator cuff. But after a week of Motrin smoothies, the pain began to subside, and I started to regain my range of motion. I am glad that I continued shooting after the fall – I did make some decent photographs. Great art comes from great pain. 

Mausoleums, Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, NJ

Why Photograph Cemetery Statues?

Why subject myself to all this? Is it to capture/create a unique image? To build up my catalogue raisonné? To have ‘alone’ time? Or is it just the JOURNEY that’s important, more so than the destination? I think it’s a combination of all that, but my reason can best be summarized in something the artist Andrew Wyeth said to his granddaughter, Victoria Browning Wyeth, “my goal is not to make pictures but to express my love of these things.”

I do love cemeteries and graveyards, which is why I use them in my art. Unlike Georgia O’Keeffe, who is widely known for her paintings of flowers, and said “I hate flowers – I paint them because they’re cheaper than models and they don’t move.” I appreciate the fact that access to cemetery statues is usually free and the statues (usually) don’t move. Cemeteries? I want to be there, and I want to create something. Paul Rudnick, in a recent New Yorker Shouts and Murmurs piece, wrote in jest about something “seemingly empty yet rife with meaning.” Describes cemeteries fairly well, don’t you think? 

Calvary Cemetery abstract, shot through glass in a snowstorm

While I certainly appreciate the beauty of a landscape or an Italian marble cemetery sculpture, I also appreciate the fact that people went out of their way to memorialize the dead. Sometimes a grave marker is the only tangible evidence that a person existed. Standing amidst these monuments can make one feel part of the human family. Like the dog, Petey, mentioned above, many of us just want to feel part of the whole.

Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia

Roland Barthes, the French literary theorist, philosopher, and critic said in 1977, “If photography is to be discussed on a serious level, it must be described in relation to death.” He added, “Its true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more” (Camera Lucida, 1980). So what better canvas with which to create new art than a cemetery? 

Sunset, Evergreen Cemetery, Camden, NJ

I also appreciate the beauty of a warm motor vehicle on a frigid day. Here’s another image I like, shot out the window of my wife’s Rav 4. Right after I made this image, I couldn’t get the power window to go back up! Panic. Twenty-four degrees outside. Another snowstorm expected tomorrow. After much fumbling around and considerably more panic, I realized there was an interlock on the door – a button that disables the power window function! Found that ten minutes later - released it and we’re back in business! Always never do that. But DO drive an SUV when you’re shooting cemeteries in the snow! You don’t want to get stuck. 

What Does Snow Add to a Photograph of Cemetery Statues?

To paraphrase Reese Witherspoon, who recently said that “Snow days were made for Chococinnos,” snow days were made for shooting cemetery statues. Why? Probably for the same reason she got in trouble for telling her TikTok followers that it was okay to eat snow. It’s novel, its enjoyable, and it probably won’t hurt you (unless you slip and fall in it, that is). 

Snow angel, Calvary Cemetery

Also, as I was surrounded by all this white, it dawned on me that one of the reasons I photograph cemetery statues is because they seem to be monochrome. They’re easy to shoot in black and white, and if you choose to shoot in color, there’s no color-balancing needed. No matter the hue, the observer’s brain corrects for it because you already know the statue is white. You don’t need a “Shirley” card to shoot cemetery statues.

(A Shirley card, by the way, was a photograph of a white woman (Shirley, a Kodak employee) used since the mid-1950s by Kodak photo labs to calibrate skin tones, shadows and light during the printing process.) 

Warholized cemetery angels (Evergreen Cemetery, Camden, NJ)

Supposedly, the Farmer’s Almanac said we are in for a rough winter. So maybe I’ll have more opportunities to shoot snow angels. I mentioned the Almanac prediction to my neighbor a couple months ago, a woman who moved to Philadelphia from Spain. She did not understand what the Farmer’s Almanac was, never having heard of it. I felt like an idiot trying to explain it, because, well, I couldn’t. To quote Pee-wee Herman: “Some things you wouldn’t understand. Some things you couldn’t understand. Some things you ... shouldn’t understand.” Like the image below….

The "Late Nights" image above is a mash up of two images combined as one. Both were made in south Jersey cemeteries during the snow week. Andy Warhol said that art is what you can get away with. Is it disrespectful or sacrilegious tromping through a graveyard making such photographs? I think that any attention we give those who have gone before us is a way of paying respect. Their memory lives on.

Old Pine Street Church, Philadelphia

One of the things Victoria Browning Wyeth has said about her Uncle Andy (who died in 2009) is that when she visits his grave, she pictures him deep underground in his casket smiling up at her. I think I’m going to imagine that from now on, when I’m photographing in cemeteries – those below are smiling up at me - and laughing, probably, when I fall.

(Cue up the R.E.M. song, “Fall On Me” ….. )