Symptoms of Cemetery Photography – Exhibit at Red Hook

"And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts And I looked and behold, a pale horse And his name that sat on it was Death And Hell followed with him ..."
- Johnny Cash, from "The Man Comes Around" (2002)

I haven’t put up a solo show of my cemetery photography in a while – been busy with other things. However, on March 22, 2013, I’ll be having an Opening Reception for a solo show at Red Hook Coffee and Tea, a lovely establishment in my neighborhood. (This is the Queen Village section of Philadelphia, near Penn’s Landing. The venue is a few blocks south of South Street on Fourth.) The exhibit will run until about April 22.

I’m showing all new work, about a dozen framed images that I’d never printed before - disturbing work, things that have scared gallery owners off in the past. Luckily, the open-minded proprietors of Red Hook appreciate a wide variety of art and self-expression. The printing of the images themselves was a new experiment for me, they’re not just regular photo paper prints. I had these professionally made on various Canson archival fibre rag papers of different weights and surfaces -  some even on watercolor paper. It is amazing how different papers can bring out the unique characteristics of an image.

So what are the “symptoms” of cemetery photography? Basically, you see death everywhere – which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. You want to photograph dead things. It helps you to accept your own mortality. People today don’t want to think about death, don’t want to know anything about it. We’re obsessed with living. Which is fine, I’m kind of partial to it myself. Typically if you become obsessed with a certain thing, you miss it greatly when its gone. Not so with life: You don’t miss it when its gone. Life allows you to be obsessed with it, and when you finally lose it, guess what? You’re dead! Or maybe I shouldn’t assume that you don’t miss it? How would any of us still among the living know that for sure? Gosh knows I’ve experienced enough weird stuff in cemeteries to believe there’s something out there we can’t understand. Not while we’re alive, anyhow.

Symptoms of Cemetery Photography

by Ed Snyder, author of "The Cemetery Traveler" blog

In my print ad for the show, I made note that the artist, Ed Snyder, is the “author of The Cemetery Traveler blog.” I wanted to impress upon interested and/or prospective viewers that I’ve been around, a practitioner of dark tourism, and that these photographs were culled from years of experience, some even painstakingly researched. A friend of mine jokingly asked, when he read the title for the show, “What are the symptoms?  Abrasions on your legs from climbing through briars on the way to the abandoned cemetery?” Well, yes, but those are corporal symptoms. Certainly cemetery photography is all about seeing shapes and capturing moods, but I was referring mainly to psychological symptoms. I am proud to say that these images look like the result of some fevered dream.

"I Am Alive"

You cannot spend a decade photographing cemeteries without it affecting your art in some profound way. I say this in retrospect, after being chronically affected by them. I don’t see things the same way anymore - for instance, I no longer see our existence as having a definite beginning and end. Hopefully, the photographs in the show will offer some evidence of that. An example would be “I Am Alive," the title for the white bronze memorial plaque at left. I toyed with various titles for this as well as all the other images. Poring over the poetry of Baudelaire and Edward Young, while pouring Angel’s Envy bourbon over ice offered me a plethora of disingenuous titles like “The Black Hearses of My Dreams.” I decided to stick with simple titles, like "I Am Alive," and for the image below, “Cherub Red.”

"Cherub Red"

Sometimes you find a scene or subject that you just don’t want to leave. In the words of singer Neil Young, you think in your mind, “I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.” But everything changes - you know you’ll never see the same scene the same way again. This might be the most profound symptom of my doing cemetery photography – realizing that even seemingly staid things like cemeteries do in fact change. They change with the seasons, with age, with weather, with living people sometimes ruining them for the rest of us.

I often have no idea why I made a particular photograph until years after the fact. Some of the images in the show are ten years old, some just weeks old. I chose them not only for shock value, but also for aesthetics. Dark images would not look good in a dark room against a brick wall! So there’s a challenge – bright, yet grim images! Hmmm. Well, we’ll see how it works. Stark black and white looks good in these surroundings, but only a few of mine are monochrome. Most are muted color images. Some are digitally enhanced photographs, or graphic art. Hopefully, the photographs themselves will transport the viewer to another place.

That said, this blog posting could very well be the longest "Artist's Statement" ever written! Am I looking to make an actual, discernible “Statement” with this show? Not really. I could be all pompous and say something like “Time is the avenger, death the great equalizer,” but I simply present the work for your consideration. Draw parallels if you will. Some of the images are very personal, some a bit embarrassing, some frightening, but together they make a statement I suppose, of where my head is at right now. I apologize in advance if anyone becomes offended by the images. God will forgive me. It's his métier.

Other “symptoms” of cemetery photography:

• The experience trains you to compose photographs in such a way that the result cannot look like a snapshot (or “snapshoddy,” as I like to call it).
• It makes me wish that many cemeteries weren’t in such a sad state of disrepair, that we as a people would, should, show more respect for our ancestors, our history.
• The endeavor made me want to write about my experiences roaming around in graveyards, hence, “The Cemetery Traveler” blog, entering its third year (!) of weekly posts.
• Have I become better able to accept my own mortality? Am I afraid to die? Not at all, though I don’t want to be around when it happens.
• You eventually learn that if you make connections with people who know where the bodies are buried, the quality of your cemetery photography is sure to improve. The more you understand about your subject, the better you can capture its essence.

So if I haven’t totally scared you off, please stop by the Red Hook for a beer! Meet some like-minded people at the Opening Reception; several of my friends, relatives, and fellow photographers will be there Friday night (6 to 9 pm, March 22, 2013). If you’ve read my blog, I’d love to meet you in person, so you can tell me what you think of my writings and photography. If you’re unfamiliar with my fine art photography, here’s an opportunity to fall down my rabbit hole. The show will be on display for a limited time only (until about April 22, 2013).

Opening Reception: Friday night 
6 to 9 pm, March 22, 2013
Directions to Red Hook in Philadelphia
Red Hook on Facebook

Falling into a Sunken Grave

So I fell into my first sunken grave today. Photographers have some great opening lines, don’t they? Here are two of my favorites (uttered by two separate photographer friends of mine at different times): “Well, we got most of the bodies out of the ground” and “I’ve broken into some new places recently.” (I should clarify - the former was uttered by a fellow who works in a cemetery, and the latter by someone who photographs abandoned buildings, and was not referring to cemeteries!)

Anyway, about the sunken grave. I was out at Mount Moriah Cemetery this weekend past (early Saturday in March), walking through the military plots with Sam, a Civil War historian. Sam and I are both on the Board of Directors of the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, and we were preparing some tour stops for the April 6, 2013 “Park Day,” which is sponsored by the Civil War Trust. We needed to identify the graves of certain Civil War veterans who died from various battle-induced injuries. This would be part of a tour discussion on Civil War medicine.

Documenting grave locations in Mount Moriah Cemetery's Naval Asylum Plot

Hawk

On this same day, Drexel University had sent a busload of freshmen students to spend the day cleaning up the cemetery as part of a “Civic Engagement” course. We had two students assisting us in the search for the graves, documenting the GPS coordinates, etc. I was taking pictures. At one point Sam walked away with the students and stopped before the giant iron ship’s anchor mounted to a pedestal in the corner of the Naval Asylum plot. I noticed a giant hawk feeding between the headstones a few rows away so I was trying to get a decent photograph of it. As I turned to walk toward Sam and the students, I snapped the photo of them you see below. Note the hole in the ground at their feet. I fell into this.

Hole in foreground, to right

The hole was about two feet deep and about two feet square. My camera flew out of my hand and I went down on my left ankle. Felt like a total nimrod as I landed at the feet of my companions! The ankle’s starting to smart now, several hours later. It’s so ironic that after years of climbing through the underbrush and forests of this wildly overgrown cemetery in West Philly, that I would hurt myself on a flat grassy surface that is (and always has been) well-maintained by the Veterans’ Administration! Bright sunny day, should’ve been watching where I was going. So as I contemplate my injury as atonement for writing such uncomplimentary things about Mount Moriah in the past, a Reiki attunement may be in order. I wonder if they still shoot horses when they break a leg?

Concrete burial vaults (unused)

In closing, sunken graves are definitely a hazard in old cemeteries.I suppose it was inevitable that I finally fell into one after exploring them for fifteen years. If a stone or concrete burial vault (shown at right) is not used to house the coffin, the ground will collapse around the coffin as it deteriorates. This forms a sunken grave, a miniature sink hole or depression of varying size. A bear trap, if you will, awaiting the unwary.

That said, sinkholes are much more dangerous than mere sunken graves. There are actual sinkhole seasons in some areas of the United States, coinciding with the beginning of the state's rainy season and usually lasts until the end of summer. Currently (March 2013), people and their possessions are falling into sinkholes in Florida and Texas! You’ll notice that the sink hole into which the Florida woman fell (link immediately below) appears to be no larger than the sunken grave with which I became intimately involved! 

New York Daily News article: “Fla. woman afraid for her life after backyard sinkholes nearly bury her alive:”

Hers was deeper, however, truly giving her the feeling she would be “buried alive.” My own experience was mainly just embarrassing – you know, that feeling you get when you do something really stupid and other people witness it?

Related Sink Hole News:
NBC News broadcast: “When the earth opens up: Why it's'sinkhole season' in Florida”

KENS5.com (San Antonio, Texas) broadcast:"Texas woman relives her sinkhole nightmare"

Eddie Lang - Jazz Guitar Great

I’d seen this monument in Holy Cross Cemetery (Yeadon, Pennsylvania) off and on for the fifteen years I’ve been making photographs in cemeteries (I live near Yeadon, which is just outside Philadelphia). I never paid much attention to it, which is odd, because I play guitar. I often see the likenesses of musical instruments engraved on the headstones of the musicians buried beneath, but since from a distance, the name “Massaro” did not jump out at me as being anyone famous, I paid little attention.

Where Dead Voices Gather

After recently reading the appropriately titled book, Where Dead Voices Gather, by Nick Tosches, I learned that Salvatore Massaro was the real name of jazz guitar legend Eddie Lang. Now, I realize that Eddie Lang is not a familiar name to most people, but please bear with. Lang was predominantly a session musician and frequently played in orchestras back in the 1920s when the music recording industry was still in its infancy. He played on the records of Bessie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and other well-known artists. (Crosby, by the way, after having worked with Lang in 1931, insisted that Lang accompany him on all his recordings and performances. He would have no other guitarist.)

We think of guitar players as flamboyant front-and-center rock stars who typically share the stage with an even more flamboyant lead singer in a rock band. Wasn’t always that way, in fact the idea of a specific band of musicians writing and performing its own music in public didn’t exist until Buddy Holly created it in 1955. The protypical three-piece rock band with voice, guitar, bass, and drums was created by Holly. Prior to that, musicians were interchangeable, just part of the band, or the orchestra. The “stars” of the performance were the band leaders, for instance Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, etc. The majority of people who actually played the music were faceless, essentially anonymous to the music-listening public. Even the lead singers were just part of the band. Eddie Lang spent most of his short career as was one of these ‘background’ musicians.

Along with Lonnie Johnson, Eddie Lang was a true pioneer of the guitar, playing mostly studio jazz sessions for other people in the early days of recorded music (1920s onward). In fact, his recorded duets with Johnson are considered to be the first important interracial partnership in jazz. Possibly due to the expected adverse reaction by the public to a black man and a white man working as equals, Lang’s – or rather, Massaro’s name appeared as “Blind Willie Dunn” on the recordings with Lonnie Johnson! (Listen to one of their duet here, "Guitar Blues.")

Detail from Eddie Lang's memorial in Yeadon, PA's Holy Cross Cemetery

Eddie Lang, a South Philly native, played an acoustic archtop guitar, which you can see in the plaque on his grave marker (he’s holding a Gibson L-5 model). This type guitar had a bigger sound for live playing – a regular acoustic guitar could easily be drowned out by other instruments. Electrical amplification of the guitar was not to be invented until 1934, a year after Lang’s death. Charlie Christian was a later guitar pioneer from the jazz era, who played such an electrically-amplified guitar. However, neither Christian nor Lang achieved anywhere near the guitar god status as their disciple, Django Reinhardt. Reinhardt is much more widely known, having achieved worldwide fame a bit later, in the 1940s, as part of the Parisian musical jazz combo know as the Quintette du Hot Club de France. At least as famous as Django’s “hot” jazz guitar playing technique was his pairing with the gypsy violin virtuoso Stephane Grappelli.  

Eddie Lang (RedHotJazz.com)

A lot goes on with musical recycling. Nowadays everything is derivative. One musician borrows another’s riff, while melodies and styles of playing are copied. True originals are rare. Lang was one of the rare people, the innovators. Not only was his style of playing original, but his guitar-based interpretations of popular songs helped pave the way for public acceptance of the guitar as a serious instrument. Segovia did the same for the classical guitar, in his interpretations of classical music written generations before him for other, more "serious," instruments. Segovia, coincidentally, was the only (then living) guitarist that Eddie Lang held in any esteem.

Lang altered the course of music in several ways. Remember I mentioned Django’s Quintette du Hot Club de France? The band’s main attraction was the dueling interplay between Django’s guitar and Grappelli’s wild gypsy violin (listen here). So here’s an interesting bit of trivia: Eddie Lang actually originated the idea of the jazz guitar and violin combo with his boyhood friend Joe Venuti. They recorded together as the Joe Venuti-Eddie Lang Blue Five. (Click here to listen to one of their compositions, "Four String Joe," recorded in 1927.) After Lang’s death in 1933, Venuti went on to become the first jazz master of the violin, and Django and Grappelli formed the Hot Club of France. Eddie Lang, i.e. Salvatore Massaro, died in 1933, due to bleeding complications following a routine tonsillectomy.

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If you’re wondering  what all the fuss was about – and especially if you play guitar – listen here to Eddie Lang's 1929 recording "April Kisses" - quite amazing. His talent and originality shine most in his original instrumental compositions.

A “Stranger’s Guide” to Philadelphia’s Woodlands Cemetery

This winter in Philadelphia we’ve had an unusually high number of “snow events,” as the weathernauts have come to call them. Luckily, none of them dropped more than a few inches of snow. I’ve long been a proponent of photographing cemeteries under duress (mine, as well as theirs), so when weather hits, it becomes a “graveyard event” for me. One weekend in late January was a prime example. A small amount of snow was predicted for Friday night, and although it was expected to be colder than a well-digger’s butt on Saturday morning, I planned to head out to West Philly’s Woodlands Cemetery.

On the morning in question as I was getting ready to leave my house in South Philly, I checked the conditions and saw that about an inch had fallen and it was not actively snowing. There would be a light coating on the tombstones and I didn’t have to shoot through falling snow. Decent conditions - light dry snow, not enough to shovel or even sweep from around my house. I threw some chemical hand warmers in with my camera gear and got ready to make the twenty-minute drive to the Woodlands.

Looking out my back door, I was reminded of my stolen snow shovel from a few years back.  One wintery Friday evening it was snowing like a mother, so our friend Tom asked to stay the night. As we sat inside holed up and ordering Chinese food, Tom thought he saw someone through the glass at our back door. I figured since there really wasn’t anything worth stealing back there I didn’t even get up to look. Next morning, I was chagrined to find my snow shovel gone – with fourteen inches of snow to shovel! I closely scrutinized the hardware toted by the vagrants who came to my front door over the next few hours asking for twenty dollars to shovel my walks. Could anyone possibly have the nerve to steal my shovel and then try to charge me to shovel my walk with it? I ended up paying two neighbor kids to do the work.
 

Headstone, Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia

But to the subject at hand: I have not spent a lot of time at the Woodlands in recent years, but I figured I should reacquaint myself with its charms as it will be one of three subjects this fall in a photography exhibit in which I will be a participant. In September and October of 2013, I along with two photographer friends will be exhibiting work at the Philadelphia Free Library (Benjamin Franklin Parkway) on “Historic Cemeteries of Philadelphia.” The exhibit will feature predominantly Laurel Hill, Woodlands, and Mount Moriah cemeteries.

As it happens, each of us had long ago and for various reasons chosen one of these cemeteries on which to concentrate, so we each have many images of these institutions spanning a ten-year period. Frank Rausch (who literally lives in Laurel Hill Cemetery), Robert Reinhardt (who has done extensive photography and research in the cemeteries of Scotland), and Ed Snyder (starring as himself), will be presenting their photography of Laurel Hill, Woodlands, and Mount Moriah, respectively.

From the photos I’ve sprinkled throughout this article, you can see that I was rather taken with the light covering of snow on everything. Rather than cover up, it seemed to accentuate small details, which I have in the past, missed. Of course, the last two times I was here it was actively snowing, so I didn’t walk around as much. From the lettering on headstones to small carvings such as the boat propeller above, the eye is drawn more to the shapes of things than their intended meaning. The geometric lines of crosses and crypt covers jump out at you, begging to be photographed. A dusting of snow on the cold shoulders of these Victorian mourning statues make them appear far more alone in their grief.

Runners at the Woodlands

It’s odd that the first things you see at the Woodlands after passing through its ornate hourglass gates are joggers, runners, dog walkers, dog runners, and track teams working out. It’s a good thing there are so many well-kept paved roads here, otherwise paths would be worn into the grass! Of the three cemeteries I mentioned, Woodlands is by far the most visited for the purpose of maintaining people's health! Due to its location in Philadelphia’s University City district, and the fact that it is very safe and well-maintained, people treat it as a getaway from the city - a park, a place to play. Oddly, this was exactly the intent of the designers and architects of the Victorian rural or “garden” cemetery, that it be a bucolic getaway from the noisy city, a place for people to enjoy themselves.

“The trees that adorn the cemetery are some of them of majestic growth, leading to the scenery and the grounds the most impressive effect.  The vistas beneath the foliage, or between the separated groves, conduct the eye to distant prospects, varied on every hand, and by every change of position,; there, the spires and public buildings of the city are beheld; here, the windings of the Schuylkill [River]; and more distant, the bright surface of the Delaware [River] and the blue hills of New Jersey skirt the horizon; while flowers and shrubs are scattered plenteously around, shedding a cheery influence in shaded lawns, or among the tombs. All that taste can suggest or science demand, consistently with the solemn purpose of the place, has been added to the superior advantages already possessed.”

– From "The Stranger’s Guide in Philadelphia …," 1852.

Woodlands' entrance gate

The above description of the Woodlands is excerpted from an odd 1852 travel guide of sorts, “The Stranger’s Guide in Philadelphia and its Environs: Including Laurel Hill, Woodlands, Monument, Odd Fellows, and GlenwoodCemeteries: with Illustrations.” I say odd because it’s  author is “anonymous” and various cemeteries are actually named in the title. Truly, in Victorian times, a city’s garden cemeteries were gems worth boasting about. While you really can’t see the rivers anymore due to the train tracks and power plants, nor the distant “blue hills of New Jersey,” the passage above makes you wonder what lovely Woodlands Cemetery looked like in 1854. No doubt the grounds themselves were at least as beautiful as they are today.

References and Further Investigation:
The Woodlands Cemetery website

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Resting in Pieces Along the Delaware River

"When my earthly trials are over, cast my body in the deep blue sea;
Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me."
- Mississippi John Hurt, 1966

With all this mid-winter rain we’re having, I think from time to time about Captain Babel Irons and his wife, Mary. Mary’s tombstone lies cast down at the waterline of the Delaware River in Philadelphia, under the Betsy Ross Bridge. How it got there is a long story, to which the reader is invited to relive through my past blogs on the subject (i.e. the destruction of Monument Cemetery, listed at the end of this article). No one knows the whereabouts of Captain Irons’ stone, or why Mary had a separate one.

Curiously, Captain Babel H. Irons does not swim with the fishes, even though his namesake schooner broke apart during a storm and sunk in the Delaware Bay. He died in 1872, Mary in 1917, and both were buried at Monument Cemetery. Mary ironically died of pneumonia – a disease that can produce fluid in the lungs – causing a person to effectively drown from the inside.

I entered the photograph you see above in an art competition and when the curator looked at it he said, “Perpetual Care?” Monument Cemetery, the initial resting place of Captain and Mrs. Irons, was condemned and bulldozed by the city of Philadelphia in 1956, to make room for a parking lot. Monument was the city’s second Victorian garden cemetery (after Laurel Hill in 1836), established in 1839. Its 28,000 bodies, including those of the Ironses, were supposedly relocated to Lawnview Cemetery in the Rockledge section of northeast Philadelphia. The monuments, headstones, and other grave markers were dumped into the river. So much for resting in peace.

The tide comes in and goes out twice a day on the shores of the Delaware, like twin slaps in society’s face for having so disrespectfully demolished a consecrated burial ground. This dumping ground is hardly as exotic as the “Neptune Memorial Reef,” the underwater cemetery off the coast of Miami, Florida. Philadelphia’s ragtag industrial Bridesburg section (where the tombstones reside), is a far cry from Miami Beach.

Tombstones at river's edge, lying against embankment

I used to joke with people that “Monument Cemetery is the only cemetery that demands you to consult the tide tables before you can visit.”  After publishing the blogs listed below, I received scores of emails and comments from descendants of those originally interred at Monument. What we’ve done to their memories is hardly a laughing matter. Many people need a burial spot, a headstone, some sort of tangible link to their past. Without that, they are rudderless, having nothing but ghost memories with no anchor to reality.

At high tide, the grimy water of the Delaware River is six feet above its low tide level. In the photo directly above, the water rises up to the tree roots. The dozens of headstones lying on the shore are covered at this time. Mary H. Irons’ stone is very close to the river’s edge at low tide, and is therefore one of the first to be covered when the tide comes in. It is as if the sea wants to touch her first.

On my last visit, I stood above the stone watching as the waves lapped around it, foaming the edges. The water rises surprisingly fast, if you have a marker like this by which to gauge its rise (one vertical foot per hour over a six-hour period). Reminding one of Captain Irons’ ship that sunk during a fierce storm in 1874, Mary’s stone stares at you like the final flare from a shipwreck.

Babel Irons may have been one of those sea captains who spent months at sea, but one thing is certain – he came home at least nine times while his wife was in her child-bearing years. They indeed had nine children! This, and the fact that Babel’s full name was Zorobabel (what a great name!), I learned from reading psychic Valerie Morrison’s website. Morrison and her staff have done considerable research into the lives of those people whose exposed headstones form the beach under the Betsy Ross Bridge. Her point is to show that all these people led actual lives, and should therefore be shown more respect. While Captain Irons fathered his youngest child, Sallie, at age 66, the more amazing thing is that Mary Irons gave birth to Sallie at age 45 – way past 40, considered even today (2013) as being advanced maternal age (meaning that women have difficulty becoming pregnant, and if they do, the pregnancy is more prone to complications).

Betsy Ross Bridge over Delaware River

Valerie Morrison, a Philadelphia area psychic, has taken on the task of raising public awareness to the plight of the headstones, and the memories, dumped under the Betsy Ross Bridge. She currently campaigns to have the exposed stones (of which there are about fifty) moved to a more respectful place. But the subject of her involvement (which was prompted by my photographs and research), will be covered in a future blog.



References and further Reading:

Ed Snyder's Monument Cemetery blog postings:

The Watery Remains of Monument Cemetery 

How Monument Cemetery was Destroyed

 Beachcombing in Hell – The Gravestones of Monument Cemetery

Valerie Morrison, Psychic Counselor and Medium website
CBS News: Final resting place - Cemeteries lack oversight
Philly.com: It's R.I.P. Tide Along the Delaware River

Love and Death

This would be quite a short blog if I were to just say, “Hey, one of my photographs was used on a magazine cover, and here it is.” But you know me better than that! First let’s talk about the magazine, or more accurately, the [British] Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. One of the editors of the JCFAR had seen my photograph, “Cupid and Psyche,” on my StoneAngels website (www.StoneAngels.net), and emailed me asking if the organization could use it as the cover image for their next issue of its professional journal. The issue would be published in February 2013 (the month in which I am writing this blog, the month of love, as it were), its overall theme being, “On Love.”

I of course said yes, as this would be an interesting topic of conversation between my wife and I, she being, in fact, a psychotherapist. Our worlds again collide – art and mental health (but they are closely related, right?).

Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research, 
Issue No.23 “On Love”  (Table of Contents):

Lucia Corti   Love Masks....

Julia Borossa   Narratives of Love

Anne Worthington   The Inequalities in Love

Werner Prall   Transference: Seduction and Transcendence

David Henderson   Where is Love?

Astrid Gessert   What Does The Woman Want? - Revisited

Alireza Taheri   Love and the Sexual Non-Rapport

Conditions of Philosophy

From the book, Stone Angels, by Ed Snyder

My own interest in the sculpture of Cupid and Psyche began with research I did in preparation for writing my Stone Angels book, which features my photograph of the statue. When I made the image back in the early 2000s, I was unaware of its mythological and historical significance – I only recognized it as a quite moving piece of sculpture, one of many examples of sensuality and death comingled in the cemetery.

 (Available from Blurb.com)

“Sex and death. Eros and Thanatos. [The psychiatrist Sigmund] Freud believed them to be our inner drives, forces that both coincide and conflict. As humans we seem to be simultaneously sexually driven and death phobic. Death and desire seem to conjugate in some fashion in our minds, a philosophy of opposites.”

“The sculpture in this photograph is a copy of Psyche Revived by Love’s Kiss, by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova [1757 - 1822]. The original resides in the Louvre. The one I photographed is in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California. The cemetery is cleverly described by its owners as the “final resting place of Hollywood’s immortals,“ which includes, quite appropriately, Rudolph Valentino.”

- Stone Angels (Blurb.com)

The Journal of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research
 

Victorian Valentine, "Love's Question" (Squidoo.com)

The interest taken in my photograph by the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research for use on its journal cover is easily understood at first blush  – the imagery is essentially that of a Victorian Valentine, and the journal issue is focused on love. However, I believe the sculpture likely has a much deeper meaning to the readers of the journal, the members of the Center for Freudian Analysis and Research. Cupid, or Eros, is waking his love, Psyche, with a kiss. [In Roman mythology, Cupid (Latin Cupido, for "desire") is the god of desire, affection, and erotic love. His Greek mythological counterpart is the god Eros.]

Canova's original sculpture

The sculpture epitomizes not only love, but death as well. Freud theorized that human nature emerged from two basic instincts: Eros and Thanatos, the libido and mortido - the life instinct and death instinct. “He saw in Eros the instinct for life, love and sexuality in its broadest sense, and in Thanatos, the instinct of death, aggression. Eros is the drive toward attraction and reproduction; Thanatos toward repulsion and death. One leads to the reproduction of the species, the other toward its own destruction” (ref. Michael Dunev Art Projects). 

So, then, if Cupid, or Eros, with his erotic embrace, is reviving the woman with a kiss, is she dead? Is Antonio Canova’s sculpture as much about death as it appears to be about love? The meaning behind the statue lies in Greek mythology, not far from Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It is an allegory about love overcoming death. As a piece of sculpture in a cemetery,  It can easily symbolize life after death – immortality.

Sleeping Beauty

Cupid and Psyche’s story is the earliest recorded version of the “wakened by a lover’s kiss” fairytale. It was told by Lucius Apuleius in his 2nd century AD novel, The Golden Ass (in the novel, the protagonist is turned into a donkey).

 William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1889

Psyche is a (mortal) princess so beautiful that people treat her like a goddess. Potential suitors are reluctant to approach her, and she can therefore find no mate. The goddess Venus is jealous of this so she decides to trick Psyche into a self-imposed “Sleep of the Innermost Darkness,” or coma-like death. Through Venous’ trickery, her own son Cupid becomes Psyche’s secret lover. Psyche implores Venus to help her find her mystery lover, and Venus imposes a series of [seemingly] impossible tasks that Psyche must perform in order to “prove her worth.” One of these tasks was to deliver a jar in which was imprisoned the “treasure of divine beauty.” Psyche wanted some for herself, thinking it might lure her mystery lover to show himself. However, the jar was filled instead with a sleeping potion. In the end, Cupid rescues Psyche from her death-sleep, and she is, as depicted in the statue,“… revived by Love’s kiss.” Cupid implores Zeus to grant Psyche immortality, so that the two lovers can be together forever. Psyche received the gift of immortality so that she could be with Cupid. Together they had a daughter, Voluptas (Greek for "Pleasure"), and they all lived happily ever after. Eros + Psyche (Greek word for the human soul) = Voluptas , i.e.,  erotic desire melded with the human spirit produces pleasure – or something like that.

Conclusion

So we can see that, as with love itself, there is much more to the "Cupid and Psyche" statue than meets the eye. The concepts of life and death touch us all - taphophiles, psychiatrists, sculptors, Disney script writers, and certainly these young lovers locked in a sort of Cupid-and-Psyche embrace that I photographed on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. In this month of Valentine’s Day, we can see how love is, in fact, a many-splendored thing. Namaste.

References and Further Reading:

Center for Freudian Analysis and Research
Antonio Canova biography
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid

http://www.ynot1.com.au/magazines/EROS%20AND%20THANATOS%20tat.pdf

Hollywood Forever Cemetery website
Greek Myths: Eros and Psyche

Victorian Valentines

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!