Skull Art and Other Transgressive Behavior

One frigid morning in January, I headed out to my local cemetery to do some photography. There was snow and ice all over the place, so why would I not head out to my local cemetery to do some photography. In fact, weeks later an ice storm was forecast for the following day and my brother told me to be careful - I told him I was prepared: I knew which cemetery I was going to visit.

On this particular January day, I was rather careful each time I stepped out of the car, cautious with each step. Last year, I slipped on the ice in a cemetery and tore my rotator cuff. Took eight months for that to heal. Had my hip replaced at the end of April 2024, so I really did not want to break any more body parts. Still, I am always looking for a new place to spend the rest of my sins.

I did not want to slip, fall, and crack my skull. Actually, either of my skulls. Today was BYO Skull Day at the cemetery, and I had two of my largest with me. One might be a quondam deer, the other a pit bull. Of the roughly ten skulls I own, all but one was found in an abandoned cemetery. The largest, an antlered deer, I severed from its spinal column with an ice chopper (in an abandoned cemetery). Yes, I know, you have questions. Really wasn’t as dramatic as it sounds – most of the flesh had been either eaten away or rotted off the bones by the time I got to it. Most of the other skulls were picked clean and bleached white by the sun by the time I found them. Takes forever for that to happen. It intrigues me that people go to such extremes to strip flesh from bones. 

Assuming I haven’t lost you by this point or severely grossed you out, lets get to the photography part. I was hoping there would be snow on the statues but there was very little. Still, the snow on the ground lent a stark, uncluttered backwash for the photography I’d planned. Well, “planned” is a strong word. Planned in the sense that I brought my skulls and some cameras. I began by looking for skull settings, i.e. statues of appropriate scale to maybe hold one of the skulls. That’s a photo of St. Lucy above holding a skull as opposed to holding her own disembodied eyeballs (look that up, I’ll wait…… I think my image is actually less bizarre than what the statue is really meant to portray.) 

For what I was doing in this cemetery today I wished I could have visualized the end product or at least recognized what step I was at in the process. Pursuing a new artistic endeavor like this is like brushing your teeth with your less dominant hand. Awkward. But you know, nothing great ever came from people who operated solely in their comfort zone. My friend Jason calls this “leaning into your limitations.”

Physically, being there that day was far from comfortable. It was almost too cold to think. Temperature was about twenty degrees Fahrenheit and even though I was wearing long underwear and had chemical warming pouches in my shoes and gloves, my fingers got cold, red, and numb on many occasions. I had to repeatedly jump back into the running SUV and blast hot air out the dashboard vents onto my numb fingers.

I would drive to a statue, decide whether it was skull-worthy, then perhaps spend twenty minutes staging a photo. On two occasions, police cruisers drove by. I assume they just figured I was some photography nut photographing statues. And of course they would be right. I kept the skull of the moment close to my chest so they wouldn’t see it as they drove by. I assume, I hope, they would’ve stopped to question me if they thought any skullduggery was afoot.

Maybe I’m channeling my inner Joel-Peter Witkin with all this, but I’m sure Witkin did all his startling, grotesque, and macabre body parts-photography in a fancy studio, with assistants - not outdoors in below-freezing winter. Maybe we’re searching for a similar grail here, I don’t know. The process of arranging skulls on cemetery statues got me thinking about Witkin’s process, what he may have been thinking or planning. The viewer typically only sees the final product. 

But art “is an event in itself, something that comes into being,” says Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his New Yorker (Feb. 3, 2005) article, Private Eye. The piece is about how a particular artist creates presence in her painted portraits. Without a doubt, a Witkin still life, or one of my images here clearly imply presence of the artist in the creation of the piece. What I’ve done should elicit a different reaction from the viewer, different from the viewer seeing a simple photograph of a gravestone. The viewer certainly can feel my “presence” in these images.

As with any still life, the material world is supposed to suggest something else. If Witkin’s and my photographs seem about as joyous as the Doomsday Clock to you, consider this other skull fun: see how artist Filip Hodas creates “cartoon fossils.” There are in fact, people even more deviant than I. Visit this website to see his lovely work!

Glenn Hendler asks in his book, Diamond Dogs, is there any way to ‘use’ a medium without being at the same time ‘in’ it? He wrote this about the David Bowie album of that name. He describes Bowie’s music on this album as having “randomness balanced with an assertion of control.” I think that might be an honest description of my own photographs. Like Bowie as he was writing these songs, I think I’m trying to stimulate my own imagination. Maybe what you see here is merely a step in a much longer process, rather than a final product. I’m not a U2 fan, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Staged still lifes can be beautiful, but random beauty can be startling. A week after my photo shoot at this cemetery, I visited another snow-covered one, where I saw the most beautiful red fox break the stillness of the snowscape with its gentle trotting. It was so fluid and graceful as it padded through the snow between the tombstones, it seemed random, but for the fox, it was probably the same path it took every afternoon. The fox trotted up the small hill toward a mausoleum. It turned around, looked at me, and flopped down in the sun alongside the mausoleum. Seemingly random nature can be more beautiful than anything a human can create.

It made me feel better about my progress, transgressive as my behavior may be. As Douglas Adams said in his novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” 

For reference and further examination:

Joel-Peter Witkin | Artnet

Karl Ove Knausgaard Latest Articles | The New Yorker

A 3D Artist Imagines the Realistic Fossilized Skulls of Endearing Cartoon Characters — Colossal

The Scattering

This blog post was guest written by my friend George Hofmann. George writes the newsletter "Practicing Mental Illness."

Down the hill just out of reach beyond a black, cast-iron fence still lays a cigarette, dusty, flicked without thought or respect into a pile of ashes, as if someone chain smoked pack after pack and tossed all thoughts of the past onto the heap. Although it has become the same color as the grey fanning over it and out across the hill it stands out, like nagging thoughts of things you should have done that you can’t push away. Guilt over someone else’s carelessness. That one thing you’ll never escape. All that remains among the remains. This is where ghosts come from.

The cemetery is such a well-ordered space that something out of place just glares at you as it breaks the peace, the silence, of the columns of dead. One after another, immobile, but drawing us back into a timeless past upon which we write the history and we choose what to inscribe on the granite that lasts longer than that history, till a time comes when no one cares anymore, and the earth takes it all back.

The scattering garden is different. It sits upon a hill that would overlook the graveyard, but a circle of trees conceals it. Evergreens, so the place is always shaded and always tucked away. There are two tables of granite off to the side, crowded with the names and dates of those scattered there. A third will be added soon, so many lives have ended and rested on that slope. Birds sing in the trees unseen, and the sound of traffic from somewhere off to the left is overtaken by the wind that makes the trees sway, but does not lift any ashes from the ground. Like the lives lived the ashes scattered here are not unform, at least not up close. But the black iron rail keeps you away, and it all looks the same, except for the time when the bag is held and the arms outstretch and empty all that is left onto the charnel on the hill.

Some would say this is just throwing the dead away. It’s not a remembered place like the ocean or a hiking trail or off the last row of the stadium of a favorite sports team. It’s contrived. It’s a built garden reserved for disposal, but with a bit more dignity and a place to come and visit and reflect. A beautiful place. The flowers and shrubs, the trees and the ribbon of sky that peaks through, and yes, the heaps of cremated remains that dive off deeply onto a patch of exposed earth where grass no longer grows.

Others would say here we don’t throw away the dead at all. Instead, we release them into consciousness where all are joined indistinguishable from one another, in the image of some unnamed god, sent back into the fabric from which we all came. This is a sharp contrast to the rest of the cemetery, with its insistent distinction of one plot from another, standing out alone with markers to prove it, and no doubt of who lies there. The scattering garden is a common grave for people secure with being common people. The ashes merge together with the souls risen and the memories swirl and while the culture may scream “me!” the dead know better. The dead are all one. It is the living that makes each stand out.

The living come in groups to the scattering garden. One is chosen, usually the groundskeeper, to open the urn and empty the bag inside. Overt religious services are rare here, but words are always spoken. Most people think they are more profound, more notable, than they truly are. But in these small groups they are notable indeed. Whereas, like the ash, we all kind of blend together into some secure irrelevance to the broader world, to these groups of loved ones, right up to the point of release, we are spectacular. Today, in the bitter cold, a widower stood with his collar raised and his eyes tearing as he leaned into the wind. His wife did routine work but in new, unusual, sometimes remarkable ways. He spoke of an early mentor who saw the way she did things and said, “you can’t do that. It’s not normal.” He said of his wife, “but she was not normal. She was better than that.” 

The groundskeeper held the bag just above the lip of the hill and poured out the remains gently, so that none would take to the air and cling to the widower’s long coat. Tonight, at home, his wife does cling to him. As does a flake or two of ash just beside the left lapel of his coat. By instinct he raises his arm to brush it away, and then realizes what he is doing and stops. He sits on the bed, falls over, and sleeps in the coat. In the morning he rises, first thought of his wife. On the way to make coffee, as he always did for her, he stops in front of the mirror in the hall. His coat is disheveled and the ash is gone.

As the sun rises the groundskeeper scales the fence and moves across the hill of the scattering garden with a rake. The little piles are evened out and a bit of dirt is mixed in to keep it all down. Midday there’ll be another family. The groundskeeper notices the cigarette and moves to rake it under, then stops. He picks it up and puts it in his pocket to take very far from here. We will be judged by the way we treat our dead and the places we leave them. What we learn from them, and how we bring them back.

Eulogy for My Mother

So my Mom died a few days before Mother’s Day, on May 14, 2023, to be precise. I’ve sort of been collecting my thoughts these last few months trying to figure out what to say. She was 84.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that I would post a blog about this. Not that bringing myself to write something has been easy. It has not. It has, however, been easy to distract myself from doing it, by finding other things to do, like, oh, I don’t know … visiting cemeteries. But I’ve got skin in the game.

I don’t want this to be maudlin or clichéd, like, to everything there is a season, I see her face in the sky, in the trees, in a running stream, all that junk. I do, however, see her face in a Wendy’s Strawberry Frosty and ripe tomatoes. She liked oddball stuff, like sardines, zucchini, black tea, fried green tomatoes, and SPAM. Which I attributed to her being of Welsh descent. I don’t know why.

Her physical health had been on a slow decline for about five years, but mentally, she was sharp. Spoke with her on the phone at least weekly (I live 120 miles away) and visited as often as I could. She loved her three children and four grandchildren. Wait – I’m getting maudlin. Let’s shift gears.

At the Bedside 

She fell in her apartment a few days before she died, and told my brother, “I think I need to go to the hospital.” I don’t really think any of us knew this was the beginning of the end, but I let my three grown children know, so they could visit. And they did. Bless them. And I know Mom enjoyed seeing them. They loved her. Her door was always open to them. It’s funny, they have so many DIFFERENT memories of her than I do. They all seem to have this lasting memory of the view over Wyoming Valley (northeast Pennsylvania) from my parents’ home on the mountain. 

Over the course of the next few days, she slowly got worse. Pain needed morphine; lungs needed oxygen. The afternoon she died, I had only been at her hospital bedside for about an hour when she started to slip away from us. My brother Tim was also there, along with my adult son Chris, and oldest daughter Juli with her new boyfriend. Wondered if this was their first date. I told him this was trial by fire for their relationship. My second oldest daughter, Collette, had been at her bedside for days prior to Mom’s demise. Her last remembrance of her grammy was when grammy was still alive. The next day my Mom was gone. Although I’m glad I was there for my Mom’s last conscious moments, I’m not sure which is easier to handle – being there or not, for that last breath.

Passing Away

When people say someone “passed away,” I always thought this was a lame and silly way of softening the blow. As Indian writer Sadhguru says, “Children are taught never to utter the word [death] at home, unless the God of Death chooses to visit, while the adults are on a quest to invent overly woke euphemisms that try to mask the bluntness of the event…” (Death – An Inside Story, Penguin, 2020).

I was surprised, however, to witness my Mom’s “passing.” That is truly how she seemed to leave us. Over the course of an hour, systems slowly shut down, pulse ox dropped (she was on cardiac monitoring), heart rate slowed, pressure dropped to essentially nothing. It was as if the curtains were slowly being drawn closed. Now I understand the gravestone symbolism of the stone-carved curtains being drawn. 

Did my twenty years’ worth of cemetery photography prepare me in any way for this? It did. I guess it made the inevitable seem more likely. Also made me realize that I’ve only got twenty years before I reach my Mom’s age. But I suppose that just as my Mom will continue to live on through all the people who knew her, I’ll live on in the memories, habits, and behaviors of people I know. 

My Mom liked my daughter Olivia’s fencing demonstration the last time we visited, and I only wish she could’ve heard and seen Olivia play the piano. I wish she could’ve seen rock star Chris on stage. I wish she could’ve seen Juli painting in her studio. I wish she could’ve joined me and Collette at the punk rock flea market. But she continues to live on in all of us.

All my children enjoy music, and my Mom did too. She was a big Tony Bennett fan, and I guess his death recently (July 21, 2023) is what finally prompted me to begin writing this. She and my Dad (also deceased) saw Bennett perform in the early 1960s at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City. Kind of glad she wasn’t around to see him go. He was a testament to longevity to her. 

Mom's last uneaten meal, with some forget-me-nots we sent her for Mother's Day.

I wish I got to play, “Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley,” for her on my guitar. If we had held a memorial service or funeral for her, this is the story I probably would have told. “Dooley” was one of the songs I practiced when I took guitar lessons when I was about thirteen. I wanted to play the guitar, but, it seems I didn’t necessarily want to LEARN how to play the guitar. The rare times I would practice at home I would plink out “Dooley” and my Dad would make fun of me. He would say, “Can you do anything other than go, ‘plink, plink, plink?’”  I never progressed while taking those lessons. I chalk it up to a bad teacher and a cheap guitar. Mom and Dad loved that song, but I never got good enough to play it. Now that I am good enough to play it (only took fifty years), I never did play it for my Mom.

Anyway - and this was back in maybe 1970 - she got fed up with my not wanting to practice one day and smashed the guitar over my head! Luckily, it was a cheap wooden acoustic, not a solid-body electric! To this day …. Or rather, to the day she died, she blocked out that episode of our relationship, said she really didn’t remember it. Ah, good times …

My interest in guitar playing resumed a couple years later as I witnessed my older cousin Jerry power chording his Les Paul through Creedence and Rolling Stones tunes. Mom went ahead and bought me a cheap electric with an amp and away I went. 

So here’s the punch line of the story. Mom hated snakes. She went to someone’s house after answering an ad in the “Country Impressions” newspaper to buy me a cheap electric guitar and amp. Legend has it that as she was paying the woman for the equipment, the woman asked her point blank if she was afraid of snakes. My mother probably paled and said “yyyyessss….?” The woman then said “Well, don’t turn around then. Just walk out this door and I’ll bring the guitar.” My mother, of course, whips around to see a giant snake stretched out on the sofa behind her! Mom took the storm door off its hinges as she threw herself outside to safety! But she came home with the guitar and amp for me. That’s what mothers do.

I appreciate all the condolences that people sent. So many heartfelt ones. I’d like to include some of them here, but I can’t really bear to look at them again. Death of a family member can bring out the best in people – and sometimes the worst. One of the most wonderful things that happened was when my childhood friend George called me to talk. We “came up” together, as is current parlance. He told me that my Mom was like a mother to him. Then he changed that and said, no she wasn’t “like a mother, she WAS my second mother!” George’s Mom (also deceased) made me feel as at home at their house as my Mom made George feel at home at our house. He said he would often have two dinners, one at my house and one when he returned to his own house. Pork chops, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken. My mother fed people.

My brother, bless him, took care of our Mom for years and sorted through so much afterward – clearing out her apartment, notifying Social Security et. al. of her passing, picking up Mom’s ashes from the funeral home, speaking with friends and relatives about Mom’s death. I am so grateful that he did all that.

As for a legacy of sorts, my Mom wrote down in a spiral notebook things she wanted my thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia to read after Mom was gone. My Mom told me a few years ago that she was doing this, and would tell me things she was writing. As difficult as it was to talk to her about this at times, I’m so glad she did it. Olivia is the youngest of my children and therefore knew her grandma the least. I have the notebook, and while not confidential, I still can’t bear to open it. At some point, I’ll give it to Olivia. No doubt its written in cursive. My Mom was so thrilled that Olivia taught herself to write in cursive, even though it was no longer taught in school.

Mom was in severe pain for the last two years of her life. It’s really horrible that medical science couldn’t relieve her pain. I guess that's partly because medicine isn't all science - its mostly an art. You're lucky to get a good doctor. As Pulitzer Prize finalist Percival Everett says in his novel, “Dr. No,” “I was reminded that what we see is really all we know; everything else is induction, deduction, or simply guesswork.”

On the way back to Philadelphia the day she died, my son Chris and I stopped at a turnpike rest stop and I pulled up alongside a car that ironically had this placard on the side. My Mom loved all kinds of fish in cans - sardines, herring, whatever other fish they tin. I posted this photo with the caption below on Facebook the day she died. May 14. 

“This is for my mom. For those of you who knew her, you may have known that she liked tinned fish. Sardines and stuff like that. I used to joke with her all the time about how gross I thought that was. My mom died today at 2 PM. Mom, wherever you are, I hope there’s a lot less pain and a lot more tinned fish. Love you.”

Ed Snyder's "Stone Angels" at Art for the Cash Poor!

On July 17-18, 2017, I will be showing (and selling) a sampling of my 17-years’ worth of cemetery photography at InLiquid’s 16^th annual “Art for the Cash Poor” event. This is a large social event in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood that will feature 100 artists, beer, live music, food, and great art - with no single piece costing more than $199!

I’ve been an InLiquid (sort of an artists’ collective) artist for over 10 years and have done the AFTCP event many times. In recent years, however, I’ve not had the opportunity to attend. My job would take me to various parts of the U.S. on the same weekend. (I would, in those instances, make the most of it and visit and photograph the grand Victorian cemeteries in the region.) In the few years since my last AFTCP showing, I’ve made a lot of new work, a portion of which you will see at the event. I will have matted prints, greeting cards, and my books for sale - which I will gladly sign. (By the way, if you purchase a book at the event, you save shipping costs versus buying them through Amazon or Blurb.com!)

StoneAngels ebook version available as well!

Artist and critic Don Brewer describes my work as “dark tourism,” and it is. Quite voyeuristic for most observers. A peek into the dim dark corners of everyone's mind, where death lurks, awaiting us all. I just happen to get a little closer to it than most of you. (Read Don's review of one of my exhibits here.) Quite often, people will tell me why they are buying a particular photograph. Sometimes it’s a funny story, sometimes disturbing, but always informative. Sharing such feelings and emotions helps us all grow, and I’m glad people find their own meaning in my work.

I do enjoy talking with all of you, so please stop by! I appreciate hearing about new cemeteries I haven't visited, and quite honestly, am surprised by some of the stories you tell me. Recently a woman approached me at a show and proceeded to tell me about the morning after her husband died. He was in the hospital and she received the sad news that night. The next morning her 5-year-old son woke up and came in to see her. She told him what happened and he said, “That must have been when Daddy was in my room last night with all the bright light around him.” I didn’t know what to say either.

Visit InLiquid’s event page to see the kind of art (and all the artists) who will be at Art for the Cash Poor with me (I will be outside, by the way, near the bands and beer!). Great opportunity to meet talented creators, for instance, my daughter Juli Snyder who will be there with her abstract “Black Arrow Arts” paintings and prints.

"Fractures in Light," Juli Snyder

Art for the Cash Poor: June 17–18, 2017 – Noon–6pm

InLiquid is pleased to present our annual summer art sale at Crane Arts located at 1400 N. American Street. Based on the premise that everyone can be an art collector, AFTCP is one of the longest running art festivals in the Kensington/Fishtown area. The best part: all works, by both emerging and established artists alike, are priced at $199 and under. This is a one-of-a-kind event where first-time collectors can speak with artists firsthand about their process, inspiration, and above all: find their niche within the arts scene.

For more examples of Ed Snyder's work, please visit these sites:

http://www.edsnyderphoto.com/

https://www.instagram.com/mourningarts/?hl=en

Children's Graves and Sperm Donors

The package of Oreo cookies I bought last week (September 25, 2011) had a stamp on it that said the cookies were okay to eat until January 2012. I love fake food! Food that doesn’t go bad for three months! Food that refuses to die a natural death.  So by mixing in bad chemicals (as writer Kurt Vonegut would say) with the cookie matter, Nabisco extends the shelf life of the product from (let’s guess) one week to twelve! Too bad they can’t mix up a bad chemical cocktail for humans, huh? Extend our lives by twelve times the normal. Why must immortality be so elusive?

The Oreos got me thinking about mortality, but two other things happened that day that REALLY got me thinking about mortality. First, I found out a neighbor backed his truck accidentally over another neighbor, killing him. Second, this show came on the telly called “Sperm Donor.”

The reality TV show Sperm Donor is about a guy who (indirectly) fathered seventy children via donation of his sperm - and, get this - he wants to meet them all! Despite this grossly egocentric desire for immortality, he’s trying to convince his fiancé to marry him. I happen to know two of the children he helped conceive – and they look like him!

Obviously, desire exists on the part of some people to procreate, when they physiologically cannot. It's great that we have the technology. Children’s gravestones from the 1800s remind us of the preciousness of life.

Back before vaccinations and prenatal care were all the rage, infant mortality was much higher than it is today. Couples back then didn’t have large families due to lack of birth control – they had large families because they knew many of the children would die young. Today we’ll use dramatic medical intervention (at a cost of perhaps a million dollars) to save one baby, while down the hall another medical team will be aborting a healthy fetus. What’s up with us? Is it really just about survival of the fittest?

They say that in a hundred years, there will be all new people, implying that all the troublemakers (and hence, all our troubles) will be gone. Obviously, that won’t happen – there will just be new troublemakers. WE will be gone, but what sort of legacy will we have left behind? If only someone were looking at the big picture (like the guy in the photo below), and telling us, “No, don’t do that – it doesn’t make sense in the long run,” or maybe, “Go ahead and eat that entire package of Oreos – tomorrow someone’s going to run you over with a truck and you’ll be dead anyway.”
 

Looking at the Big Picture

Further Viewing:

(If you can stomach this freak show)
Sperm Donor, broadcast on The Style Network

Vaccine History and Achievements (The National Network for Immunization Information) 

And for the contrarians out there:  Vaccines Did Not Save Us – 2 Centuries of Official Statistics