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.