Film Experiment Gone Bad

Shooting long-outdated film can give you some fabulously incorrect results. At left is an example of what you could end up with. While I’ve had great luck over the years with long outdated slide film (which is the origin of the image at left) and black and white negative film, I only recently shot my first roll of outdated Kodak Vericolor III color negative film. It had been freezer-kept and was outdated as of 1984. (For the record, I’m writing this in 2013, so the film was 29 years out of date!

Back in the fall of 2012, I walked through Mount Moriah Cemetery in West Philadelphia with some friends who had never been there, so it was really a multi-purpose visit. I was experimenting with the Vericolor film on a wonderfully sunny Sunday morning. They quite enjoyed the scenery, and I liked playing tour guide. The cemetery is quite picturesque, with most of it still being wildly overgrown. (For the record, the cemetery is no longer abandoned, but it has no legal owner at this point in time. The situation is being hashed out in court as I write this.) One of my friends was shooting some outdated Kodak black and white slide film in her SLR. Her images came out blank, and mine were almost as bad.

Mount Moriah Cemetery gatehouse

My friend Bob at Mount Moriah

I was using an old Canon AE-1 SLR with a flea market-purchased 18 – 70mm lens (I paid a quarter for it!). I was expecting fabulous results with this super wide angle lens; however, the camera battery started dying about ten exposures into the 36-exposure roll. I’d compose a shot, set the exposure, trip the shutter, I said, trip the shut.... half the time the shutter wouldn’t release because the batteries were low. Of course I had no spares. Argh. I spent so much time getting through this roll, that I barely made any digital images. So after about four hours of traipsing through the thicket, we called it a day.

When I got my film back from the lab (Philadelphia Photographics, which handles all my quirky film needs with great skill and diligence), I found that I was the proud owner of no useable images. Pretty much all of the emulsion washed off the film substrate during development, resulting in a “thin” negative – so little emulsion was left that there was barely a ghost of an image to be printed. Seems appropriate for a cemetery, right? Well, such a result can lead to immense frustration, if you spent hours shooting the roll and exposing every frame carefully.

The reddish and purplish images you see here are scanned from my negatives – very grainy, not much contrast. Colors all wrong. Scanning the negatives and working with an image editing program could possibly salvage the images to a small degree, but don't expect a miracle. Desaturating the images (making them B/W) so that you're only working with shades of grey might yield something better, but there's a subtle technicality when it come to manipulating a scanned image, which prevents you from wreaking all the magic on it that you could otherwise wreak on an original digital image. An electronic scan of a negative holds far less digital information than if you had shot the scene with a digital camera in the first place. So for example, brightening the shadow areas to bring out detail is not as easily done with a scanned negative - there simply is no information there to manipulate! In fact, most of the photo editing capabilities in such a program as Adobe Photoshop become far more limited in their effectiveness when your original image is not digital.

My advice? Never experiment when your results really matter! Using outdated film is just that, an experiment. In my case, I went back to Mount Moriah a few weeks later and performed the same exercise over again, but this time with tried-and-true Ektachrome slide film, which always gives me great results – even if it is twenty years old and I cross-process it! An example from that roll is at the top of this article (mausoleum through the weeds) as well as the Mount Moriah gatehouse below.

Gatehouse shot later on outdated Ektachrome film

In my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient, (available from Amazon.com), I go nowhere near the subject of experimenting with film, alternate development processes, or experimental printing. Its a wild world out there, and not for the faint of heart. You can get wild results, but these adventurous areas can be wildly complicated - and often the results are not reproducible (which is one reason it is difficult to give step-by-step instructions in these areas of photography)! An example of that last statement relates to the age of outdated film: five year-old-film can yield drastically different results from ten-year-old film, even if it is the exact same film and both have been freezer-kept.

Ed's book, available from Amazon.com

Attempt to bring out shadow detail

Original image

 As I said, I've had much better luck with outdated slide film and black and white negative film than I had with color negative. Therefore, it can do no harm to note in passing that when I was recently offered about a hundred rolls of outdated film, I only took the half that were not color negative! So I’m well-stocked for further photographic adventures with 35mm Ektachrome and 120mm [BW] Plus-X.

Some readers out there are probably wondering, “Where can I get outdated film?” Your friends may be a good source. Some photographers still have rolls in their freezers from before they went digital. Some non-photographers might have film left from a college photography course they took years ago! Most are happy to give it away. Ebay is another source, and sometimes camera shops will sell outdated or near-dated film at half price. B and H Photo in New York usually does this. Outdated film - use it sparingly or use it daringly!

Cemetery Coffee

I sit here in my kitchen at 7 a.m. nursing a cup of hot coffee and some minor bodily bruises. Fell on the ice in my driveway last night after getting out of my car. Went down like a ton of bricks – “ass over tin cups,” as my father would have said. Car keys ejected themselves from my key ring as it left my hand; with the projectile force of small missiles, they shot randomly into the darkness and snow. Ow. 

Anyhow, I’m sitting here staring at my coffee cup and wondering why I never wrote about Leverington Cemetery, which is located in Roxborough, Pennsylvania. That’s the horizon of the cemetery you see beyond Bob’s Diner on the mug above, the headstones casting long shadows from the morning sun. Weird design, huh? Bob’s owner (who I don’t think is actually named Bob) had a rather lively turn of mind to celebrate the fact that his diner was right next to a cemetery – great landmark to find the place!

Bob’s may just be the best greasy spoon diner in the Philadelphia area. I bought the mug there after a completely satisfying breakfast. You sit at the counter eating your scrapple and eggs while the short-order cook stands in front of you slamming more of the same on the grill for the next person. You can see the cemetery out the window, with traffic running on busy Ridge Avenue in front of the place.  Truly a “5 Star” “Monumental” eating experience, as the sign and mug describe.

Civil War Memorial, Leverington Cemetery

Roxborough is a suburb of Philadelphia, physically above Manayunk on a steep hill. Bob’s essentially sits at the top of Levering Street, or the “Manayunk Wall,” which is the focal point of the (bicycle) cycling world’s most grueling U.S. race course. “The Wall” is a section of the race circuit that is an 800-meter incline up Levering Street – it reaches a seventeen percent grade in spots. Doesn’t sound like much? Try walking that one time! The race is a 124-mile one-day event consisting of a 14.4 mile circuit that has cyclists riding up the wall SEVEN TIMES in the same day! (See link for more bike race info.)

At the top of Levering Street is the Leverington Cemetery. Its old American civilian graves are scattered among the graves of Revolutionary war soldiers and monuments, Civil War graves and a monument to those who died in that “War of the Rebellion.”

There is an amazing monument to a Civil War nurse, Hetty Ann Jones, with a medical tent carved in marble (see image below). Jones worked as a nurse caring for Union soldiers wounded in the war. She left Philadelphia's Roxborough area in 1864 to be closer to the front lines, at General Grant's HQ in City Point, VA. Within a month, she succumbed to pleurisy (a lung disease) in her “chilly, leaking tent.” She died alone, fairly quickly. Her family was sent for, but it was too late. I wonder if the tent flap is open awaiting them to come bid her farewell …? “Like a faithful soldier, she died at her post,” says the book, Woman's Work in the Civil War.

Civil War nurse Hetty Ann Jones' grave, Leverington Cemetery

 

Leverington Cemetery is quite large, its land running far back off Ridge Avenue. The frontage is only about half a city block wide, which might give you the idea that it is rather small. The grounds are surrounded by wonderfully spooky iron fencing, the kind Tim Burton might have patterned the sets of The Nightmare Before Christmas after. I love the unusual granite pillars at the cemetery entrance.

The last time I’ve visited (summer 2012) I explored a bit back beyond the maintenance shed reading the names on the older headstones. I snapped this photo (above) at the time because I thought the headstone in the shape of a bread slice was distinctly odd. The older stones are back behind the adjacent closed Baptist church, its graveyard adjoining Leverington Cemetery with no perceptible line of demarcation. The church has been closed since the 1980s.

Most burial records for Leverington Cemetery were supposedly lost in a fire in the 1960s. Aside from the Civil War monuments, most of the grave markers are regular-sized, marking the graves of regular, non-affluent people. A lovely small-town cemetery up on a hill, with trees and grounds that are well-cared for (by whom, I don't know), Leverington Cemetery is a quiet oasis in the center of a busy commercial district.

That said, ghost hunters seem to love the place. Search the Internet for “Leverington Cemetery” and instead of historical information, all you’re likely to learn is that “apparitions” are seen “frequently.” On returning to my car the last time I was there, I walked around the maintenance shed and found one of the large red barn doors open. Luckily I only glanced inside -  I wished the sight had been just an apparition. However, I was mere yards away from some warm-blooded breathing guy taking a dump into a plastic five-gallon can. Perhaps he had a key, perhaps not. When your time comes, you have to let nature take its course, right? Time to finish my coffee and close the book on this topic.

References and Further Reading:

Woman's Work in the Civil War
Video: This is Manayunk in Bike Race Mode

Soul in the Stone

What you see here is the cover of a book I purchased some years ago, though I don’t remember why. I suspect it was because there were so precious few cemetery photography books in print a decade ago that I would buy anything I came across. I think I probably saw Soul in the Stone (Cemetery Art from America’s Heartland), by John Gary Brown,  for sale on the front desk at some Midwestern cemetery (which is where most of these books are, I suspect - someone should make a list).

Satchel Paige (ref.)

Anyway, I pulled Brown’s large coffee-table hardcover off my bookshelf the other day after someone told me about baseball great Satchel Paige’s burial spot, and how wonderful the cemetery is in which it resides (Forest Hills), which is in Kansas City. I figured I might find a photo of it in here. Paige was a black pitcher in the major leagues and a Baseball Hall of Famer. His career spanned the twenty-seven years from 1926 to 1953, and he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971. There are no photos in the book of Satchel Paige's gravesite, just a few words about Forest Hills being the location of his burial spot. (To see photos of his memorial monument, check this link.)

“Don't look back, something might be gaining on you.” – Satchel Paige quote, from his tombstone

Paige's gravemarker (ref.)

In looking through the book, I was taken aback by the photography. It really is a portfolio of haunting black and white cemetery images (especially the chapter on children’s graves). The photographs are not happy, but ponderous and sad – moods which likely reflect that of many of the people who commissioned the sculptures and imagined their loved ones’ epitaphs. There are no photos of Paige’s tombstone, possibly because it is somewhat happy and celebratory, but what I did find was a treasure trove of cemetery art, both iron and stone.

The text is informative and will provide interesting reading to both the experienced and novice cemetery traveler alike. Brown introduces the reader to the concept of the Victorian garden cemetery, then moves to the movement’s influence specifically on those cemeteries established in America’s “heartland” states - Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Colorado, and New Mexico.

“Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.” – Satchel Paige quote, from his tombstone

Brown covers all the standard topics - gravestone symbolism, epitaphs, graves of the famous as well as gravestones that are famous themselves (e.g. the astounding Davis Memorial in Hiawatha, Kansas). Surprising to me is a section entitled “Outstanding Burial Grounds.”  What a great idea! I LOVE subjectivity! Seriously, I don’t mind considering another person’s opinion on such matters as long as sufficient detail is provided. THIS is what I want to see as I plan my travels to new places! Brown does an excellent job with this, as the cover leaf indicates: “Brown’s own artistry and insights reveal the ways in which these works embody or reflect personal grief, family relationships, religious and ethnic values, occupations, avocations, and social status.” The book itself a “haunting tribute to a neglected art form.”

“Avoid Fried meats which angry up the blood.” – Satchel Paige quote, from his tombstone

As if the author's photographs weren’t melancholy enough, I also found in the book two love letters from old girlfriends. (For the record, both are dated prior to 2008, the year I got married!) But hey, this is supposed to be a book review, of sorts. So let's get back on track. Some of Brown’s images rival those of Ansel Adams (who was also known to make a cemetery photograph or two) – these are far more than snapshots taken to support the text; they are truly riveting in their own right.

You won’t see very many angel statues in the book, which may be one reason I neglected it on my bookshelf for so long. This may be due to a paucity of such statues in the cemeteries visited by the author, or simply his avoidance of the more common cemetery statuary as subject matter. The book, however, does not suffer from this. Brown documents some wildly imaginative monuments that more than hold one’s interest (for example, the Harding family plot in Nebraska City which is a full-sized marble rolltop desk and the 1925 Chevy engine mounted in stone as a grave marker in Garden City, Kansas!). It must be said, however, that Brown’s photographs of even the most simple and spare grave markers are as fascinating as the elaborate ones – a tribute to his skill as an artist (he paints as well as makes photographs, as his website indicates). He seems to infuse many of the cemetery stones he photographs with his own soul.

Soul in the Stone, by John Gary Brown

One of the few examples of an angel statue in Soul in the Stone is actually a photo of a statue in Italy. Brown's descriptive history of the Herman Luyties monument in St. Louis (above, left side of page spread) is typical of the attention he gives to subjects in his book. The following is directly quoted from Soul in the Stone:

While on tour of Italy in the early 1900s, Herman Luyties, owner of the  first proprietary drug store in the city of St. Louis, Missouri, met and fell in love with a sculptor’s model. Luyties proposed marriage to the beautiful lady, but she declined his offer and he returned to St. Louis brokenhearted. Before leaving Italy, he commissioned the sculptor to produce a twelve-foot marble statue based on his beloved model.

After the statue was delivered to St. Louis, he kept it in the foyer of his home, so that he could see it every time he arrived or departed. Because the several-ton sculpture was thought to be damaging the structural integrity of the house, it was eventually moved to the family burial plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery.  After Luyties died at the age of fifty, he was buried at the foot of what came to be known as “the girl in the shadow box.”

Herman Luyties was probably unaware that the statue produced for him was based on a cemetery monument that his love had modeled for previously. I found and photographed this voluptuous angel in Viturbo, Italy, long before discovering the Luyties monument. The addition of wings makes her seductiveness all the more unsettling, bringing to mind a Mae West voice that coaxes us to “come on up to heaven and see me sometime.”

References and Further Reading:

For more information on Satchel Paige's grave site, click here.

Soul in the Stone available at Amazon.com

 

 

A Retrospective Show

While it is certainly true that artists exhibit their work to show it off and to sell it, there is a more subtle reason: to see how it affects other people. I don’t do this consciously myself, but after a recent exhibit, it was apparent to me that many people were affected by my photographs in various ways. The show was a retrospective spanning 15 years of my cemetery photography, though I hadn’t planned it that way. I just gathered together all the framed pieces I had lying around and set them up at a gallery for a one-night show. It was ad hoc, initiated at the request of a friend.

The gallery owner, Richard Prigg of Sycamore Studio in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania (a southwestern suburb of Philadelphia) needed art in a hurry as his scheduled artist backed out at the last minute. Each month, he has a one-day exhibit of his own paintings and stained glass work along with that of a guest artist. So I delivered about seven each 16x20 and 11x14 framed photographs, some images of which I've included here in this article.

"Stone Emotion," Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon, PA, 1997.

"Blessing," 2012

A few days later at the reception, I was quite pleased at how he hung my work in his gallery. One side of the white room were his original paintings and stained glass art, the other side had my photography. As I viewed the hodge-podge of my work on display, I realized that it was a loose retrospective of the cemetery photography that I've done over the past 15 years. From “Stone Emotion” - one of the very first stone angel images I’d made, back in say, 1997, to very recent work in the abandoned Gladwyne Jewish Cemetery ("Blessing," see right). There were also pieces from near and far – many from the Philadelphia area (where I live) to California and Rome, Italy. Looking at some of my more recent work, I could easily see some photographic miscegenation, which is just a nice way of saying that everything is derivative.

"Eros and Psyche"

A few nights later when people began showing up for the opening reception , I was frankly amazed at how most of them came up to me and asked me about my work, either in general or about some specific aspect. Oddly, no one but the gallery owner asked me the most obvious question, which is “Why do you photograph cemeteries?” (I really have no good answer to this.) But all topics and questions brought up were astute observations or probing questions, such as those related to the image at left: "What is this?" and "How did you manage the lighting?" It was very enjoyable discussing my work at both the artistic as well as technical levels. (This image, by the way, will be used as the front cover for the January 2013 issue of the [British] Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research - the issue topic will be "Love.")

Sometimes people just show up at these opening receptions for the cheap wine and cheese doodles. This did not happen at Sycamore Studio (for the record, the gallery owner actually served craft beer, good wine, and fine crudités!) Most of the attendees were friends of his, and most were involved somehow in the arts - even the retired police officer/artist who used to sketch nudes on the backs of his reports. (Once when the judge was reading one of his reports at a hearing, the district attorney started laughing because everyone could see the nude on the back!) Since it was really an unusual experience for me to literally talk myself hoarse to dozens of people about so many aspects of my work, I thought I'd blog about it. Here are some of the topics and questions raised:

"Angel Face"

• "How do you title your work?" Not well, I'm afraid. Descriptive titles work better for me than artist gibberish. For example, "Angel Face" to describe the image at right, versus, oh I don't know, something like "Space and the Passage of Time." 
•  "How do you print your work?" Well, I pay other people to do it. In my book, Digital Photography for the Impatient (available from Amazon.com), the chapter on printing is the shortest! That's because its really difficult to do it yourself and trying to explain how and where to get professional prints made from digital media is an enormous topic. Also, the technology changes rapidly.
• "Have you photographed the wonderful oceanic view cemeteries of Ireland or Hawaii?" Um, no, but I have been to Baltimore.

By Ed Snyder (Amazon link)

I really appreciate the fact that some old friends of mine came too. It certainly takes some of the pressure off! There were also people in attendance who are involved with the Lansdowne Arts Board, a group of people exemplifying and promoting various artistic endeavors in the town. One project they are currently funding is an “art house,” in which people can take classes in the arts. The plan is for it to be staffed by three artists-in residence: a poet, a painter, and a sculptor. The fact that such a vibrant arts community exists in Lansdowne,  Pennsylvania was surprising to me, as I used to live nearby and had no idea this was all happening!  

"Under the Betsy"

• “Have you visited the abandoned buildings in Centralia [Pennsylvania]?” No, but it is on my bucket list. Along with the cemetery there. I think this came up as we were discussing my images of the discarded tombstones under Philadelphia’s Betsy Ross Bridge (click here for that bizarre story!). A photographer at the opening wondered if I thought it possible to film the  tombstones from underwater!
• “Would you like to do a show of your work in the old one-room schoolhouse in St. Paul’s cemetery?” [This is in Ardmore, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia]. Why certainly, thank you for asking.
•  “How do you achieve these photographic effects, Photoshop?” I'm always flattered when people ask this as I rely mostly on my skills to achieve the best initial image capture; very rarely will I Photoshop something afterwords.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating conversations I had was with a woman who was on the board of a non-profit organization called “In Company with Angels.” For those of you who appreciate Tiffany stained glass, this is noteworthy. She told me the fascinating story of how seven early-1900s Tiffany angel stained glass windows were found in a barn near West Chester, PA, in 2001. "In Company with Angels, Inc. was founded by people from a small town in Pennsylvania who were inspired to share their rediscovery of a unique set of seven Tiffany angel windows with the world." The angels are part of a traveling exhibit, currently at the Montgomery [Alabama] Museum of fine Arts. I'm sure these are amazing and hope to see them (and photograph them!) one day.

Rick Prigg, the owner of Sycamore Studio, is in fact a stained glass artist in addition to being a PAFA-educated painter (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts). As I have photographed and written a bit about mausoleum stained-glass windows (and had a photograph of one in the exhibit, see above), I was able to discuss such things with him on at least a peripheral level. He shared some fascinating stories about retrieving valuable stained glass windows from old churches for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia which it had been closed by the Archdiocese over the years. Trying to remove stained glass windows as vandals were actively throwing bricks through them from the outside must have been a trying experience!

So, sometimes you do a show of your art work to score a point or just stay even. Sure, you might make a few sales, but perhaps the best reason for showing your work publicly is to stimulate discussion. This may (or perhaps should) result in the stirring of your own creativity. It may reinforce what you're doing right and make you consider ways to improve your weaker areas. So my advice to anyone who publicly exhibits their artwork: don't ever pass up an opportunity. As for an answer to the question sometimes posed to me of “Why do you photograph cemeteries?” The best answer may very well be to stimulate discussion in related areas. And since cemeteries are really all about us, I suppose anything and everything can be a related area!