Artists in the Time of Coronavirus

In March 2020, two weeks into quarantine lockdown of COVID-19, Artblog Philly sent out this announcement:

OPEN CALL for Virtual Exhibition ‘Artists in the Time of Coronavirus’
By Artblog March 19, 2020
ARTBLOG IS CALLING ALL ARTISTS, yes ALL makers and creators with a connection to Philadelphia, to participate in our online community project: "Artists in the Time of Coronavirus."

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Assuming we haven’t all died by the time you read this, you can hit their link here.
https://www.theartblog.org/2020/03/open-call-for-virtual-exhibition-artists-in-the-time-of-coronavirus/

I submitted a 250-word piece with some photos and I don’t know if they’ll publish it (I’m not pithy or squee, a doomsayer or a highbrow artist), but I figured I’d publish my submission here so at least you can see it. I’m adding a bit to it, so don’t count the words. Of course, if you can’t buy toilet paper in this corona-era, you probably don’t care much about wordcount anyway.

So, “Art in the Time of Coronavirus…." 

I’ve been a practitioner of social distancing since before it was a thing - I photograph abandoned sites and graveyards. Sometimes I even explore abandoned graveyards. Truly isolated locales. Some of these images were made during such an exploration this past week - the six-foot social distancing rule is rather easy to achieve in a graveyard.

For me, creating art is a personal and solitary experience, but I’ve learned that sharing it with others is vital. Years ago when I began exhibiting my photographs of cemetery angel statues, people would tell me why they were purchasing certain pieces. It scared me that others could find meaning in my work. Greater meaning than what I thought was there. So I appreciate the effort Artblog is making to create an audience for artists at this trying time.

We may think ourselves insular, that we create art only for “ourselves,” but I don’t believe that is true. Creative people in this day and age rely on an audience – and increasingly, that is a web-based audience. If COVID-19 continues, that may be our ONLY audience. Pre-Internet writers, composers, and painters may truly have created work mainly to please themselves. If they had received instant feedback (in the form of Internet silence), some of the “great” work may never have seen the light of day (think of Ulysses or The Great Gatsby, neither of which was well-received at the time of publication, by either the critics or the public).

Death and decay are concepts I gravitate toward, whether denoted by abandoned buildings or made more tangible by cemeteries. These latter reminders of our mortality have seen an upswing in popularity - cemetery visits by “normal” people have increased this past week! The government has issued a “no public gatherings” order and most people don’t have to be at work, so why not enjoy a beautiful spring day in a Victorian sculpture garden? Just enjoy nature - you don't even have to contemplate mortality ...

When you think about it, this was the original purpose of nineteenth century “rural” cemeteries – beautiful getaways from the grimy, noisy city. Philadelphia’s luxuriant garden cemeteries, Mount Moriah, the Woodlands, and Laurel Hill were the go-to open-air art galleries and parks of the Victorian era (there WERE no art galleries or parks back then!).

John and Olivia

My daughter Juli told me she saw at least fifty people in Philly's Woodlands Cemetery last week when she was there walking her dog. I saw several people with little kids at Laurel Hill Cemetery when I stopped by. Last weekend, I happened on my neighbors walking through the graveyard of the Old Swedes’ Church – Gloria Dei – near my house in South Philly. Here’s their little girl running among the gravestones. Graveyards - a last vestige of greenspace.

Currently, all the stores and businesses are closed. Some are even boarding up, expecting the worst. What’s the worst that can happen? Amazon closes all its distribution centers and widespread looting begins? As we look to create Art in the Time of Coronavirus, consider the words of John Lennon: “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” Public gatherings have become non-existent with COVID-19, and so the city’s wonderful graveyard greenspaces have taken on greater value. Visit them – imagine them to be your next artistic muse – their residents are six-feet-under, a safe social distance. Now is a good time to contemplate life in general – not one of us is getting out of this alive. 

You can see a new post every day on my Instagram page:
IG: https://www.instagram.com/mourningarts/
Website: https://www.edsnyderphoto.com/

Elysian Fields – The Second Coming

As you may recall from our last episode, I spent some time photographing an abandoned cemetery and had a bit of a challenge getting out afterwards. So when the opportunity arose to return to the same site two days later, I licked my wounds, cuts, scrapes, and bruises and jumped at the opportunity. You know what they say about lost opportunity: “a squandered gift, a wasted day, time chases life away” (at least the band Slaid Cleaves says so in their song, “Sinner’s Prayer”).

How did this come about? Well, some friends of mine expressed interest in photographing this same site, folks who like me, appreciate the beauty in entropy. It was such an amazing place, that I could not resist a second visit. I was to meet them nearby and we would all climb the fence into the graveyard. We met at the appointed hour; however, I misjudged the expected activity at the site next door. This had been staid on my last visit; now, it was now teeming with activity. Backhoes digging, pickup trucks zooming around. So we found a climbable section of the fence, out of view of the construction people. My companions, who were much younger and more limber than I, had no difficulty getting up the fence and down the vine-covered tree on the other side. I had some difficulty, the final portion of my trip culminating with a slide down yonder which scraped a few inches of skin on my forearm. But hey, no guts, no glory. 

Off we trudged into the old, gnarly graveyard. Sky was clear, weather was cold. This particular area was easy to walk through, but just ahead we could see hillocks of invasive mile-a-minute weeds engulfing monuments, headstones, and everything else in its path. Looked like a lunar landscape of dead farmland, or something. The cemetery is preserved, but not in a way that it was intended. Trees, growing at odd angles, their crooked branches strangled by vines, are so huge that they dwarf and enshroud thirty-foot tall obelisks. You wonder if old cemetery trees look as they do partly because of the arsenic and other nasty embalming chemicals in the soil.

While my prior visit to Elysian Fields (not its real name, as you may have guessed) offered a splendid opportunity for independent study, this visit would be otherwise. Shooting with others forces you to see things differently, sometimes to see things their way. It’s also safer if you’re not by yourself – who knows what you’d come upon in such a place - thieves stealing bronze doors off mausoleums, animals, or worse. I pointed out some familiar locations to my fellow photographers. At least one member of the party had never been in here, and it’s interesting to see that look of wide-eyed wonder on someone when you know they appreciate the initial experience as much as you did. Kind of like when a friend took me to the movies when Jaws was first released. He had seen the film a couple days before and knew when all the scary parts would happen. Instead of watching the movie at those times, he watched me to see my reaction!

I can describe this old graveyard to the best of my ability, but it really is not something that can be adequately expropriated by word or even image (though I am satisfied with the images I made). On a smaller scale, it would be akin to me describing or photographing the Grand Canyon and expecting you to appreciate it as if you were there. 

This was the type of day that achieves meteorological perfection, photography-wise. During my visit two days before, I must admit I was rather in a fugue state: kind of an altered state of consciousness in which you move about purposely but are not fully aware. Almost like the Stendhal Syndrome. The place has that kind of effect on you. Even with four of us moving around making photographs, reading epitaphs, little was spoken. There was little interaction as each individual took in the scene though his own filter.

Did it seem anti-climactic for me to be here a second time just days after my last visit? I might say that I wasn’t filled to the brim with a sense of purpose, though such photographic plentitude allowed me to concentrate on more detail than before. I made better and closer photographs of the monuments, I went inside the mausoleums whose doors were ajar. True, I was familiar with the terrain and locations of certain monuments, but repeatedly walking through a cemetery does not repeat the experience. You can never step into the same river twice. The weather changes, the lighting changes – even if you are there at the same time of day as I was two days before!

Though it was a sunny day, it was again cold – in the forties. Tomorrow it would rain, the next day it would turn sharply colder and snow. The angels and mourning women care not, as they commune in the shadows of giant obelisks and monuments. The famous and not so famous comingle throughout this vast sculpture garden, the tangles of foliage giving evidence of Nature trying to reclaim her territory.

As we enter beckoning mausoleums with their missing stained glass windows, it is evident that theft occurs. No one legitimately comes in here, save the very occasional descendant. I notice a couple of fresh Christmas wreaths lying at the base of two headstones, their dried-up predecessors lying outside the plot area. Weird. Aside from this, everything looks as if in suspended animation, but from what year? 1970? 1940? 1910? Difficult to say. In its present state, this place has an immense amount of character, and is one of the most photographically interesting abandoned sites in the history of history.

Typically cemeteries offer distinct boundaries between the sacred and the profane, but this place is quite the opposite. There is memory preservation here, and that’s good. But perpetual care? Not so much. The child buried beneath the statue (in the photo below) will always be a child. John Barrymore’s legend will live through the ages, but who visits and honors his grave? A cemetery is a way of preserving things. Not necessarily the past, more like the present. This forsaken old Victorian graveyard is not just who we were, it is also who we are. However, I’ve learned to keep an open mind about such abandoned sites as this – just because it is not kept up does not mean people don’t care about it. 

All the while I was at Elysian Fields I was getting texts and cell phone calls. Rather annoying and couldn’t concentrate. So I decided to leave before the others were done. I had an ulterior motive, I must confess: I was not keen on having witnesses to my expected ungraceful exit over the fence! So I made my way through the weeds, back behind the beyond where I expected to find safe passage home. 

Unfortunately, the backhoes were now digging right there! Second best, I would attempt to climb the tree where we had come in, and hop the fence at that point. I managed to get to the top of the barbed-wire fence by pulling myself up the tree like freaking George of the Jungle when – a pickup truck zoomed into view! I did not want anyone to see me, though I wasn’t at all sure they would even care, so I loosened my gloved grip and the vines gave way! The only thing that broke my six-foot fall were all the dry-rotted tree branches lying on the ground. They say our physical senses reflect our current belief system. If that is indeed the case, I believe I just fell out of a tree. But they also say that the responsibility for our pain is our own.

After checking to make sure nothing else was broken, I got pissed off and grabbed the nearest vine and pulled myself up to the top off the fence, damn the pickup trucks. I got to the top, saw no one in site and made a break for it. I dropped down the opposite side, grabbed my photography gear, and walked nonchalantly across the grounds to my car. As nonchalantly as I could with torn pants and sticks and leaves sticking out of my hair.

Creating abandoned site photographs is exhilarating. The danger is evident in every picture. This is probably why I enjoy similar work by others – I know how difficult it is to gain access to these places. I appreciate others’ work, when it is something that I myself may be too scared to attempt.

Please click here to read part one of this story:
A New Year - A New Abandoned Cemetery