Not to be confused with an “All Ages Show,”  this exhibit is a ten-year retrospective of Ed Snyder’s Cemetery Statuary Photography.

Exhibit runs the entire month of December, 2009 (daily, 7 a.m. – 9 p.m.)

Philadelphia Java Company, 518 South Fourth Street (near South St.), Philadelphia, PA   (215) 928-1811

Matted framed images for sale by contacting artist: mourningarts@yahoo.com

Opening Reception Friday, Feb. 15, 6 – 8 pm.
http://saintasaphs.org/Current_Exhibit.html

Ed Snyder is having a show of his photography at St. Asaph Gallery, Feb. 17 – Mar. 16 2008. Twenty images spanning his 10-year study of cemetery statuary will be on display. The exhibit merges art and photography with society’s desire to come to terms with death and dying. Oh, and there will be wine and snacks to lighten things up a bit.

St. Asaph church, attached to the gallery, is sort of a miniature gothic cathedral, complete with gargoyles and Tiffany stained glass windows! It’s located one block off City Avenue, near Belmont Avenue in Philadelphia. Please see their website for directions: http://saintasaphs.org/Contacts.html

Intro

A friend loaned me “Safelight” because it’s about photography and death—two of my hobbies. She said it made her depressed. And it is a depressing book, in the same way “Tuesdays With Morrie” (Mitch Albom) is a depressing book. Drawing from his experience as a paramedic in Harlem, the author takes us on a gritty ride through the squalid backstreets of NYC circa 1990. Through his main character Frank, a paramedic, Mr. Burke relates life through ambulance calls with gruesome clarity and realism. Frank’s job is the vehicle for the story.

What is Safelight about?

The word safelight refers literally to the reddish light used in photographic darkrooms. Metaphorically it has other meanings in the book. Written in the first person, Safelight is a riveting account of a two-year portion of the main character’s life. Frank, the paramedic, is also an amateur photographer who likes to photograph dead, injured, and decrepit people. It appears to be a sick habit his coworkers tolerate, maybe even admire. We never really find out why he does it (to which I can relate, as a photographer), only that it helps him cope in some real way with his life and the death of his father. Frank enters a relationship with a terminally ill woman, a professional fencer. Life happens quickly in this relatively short book.

What is Safelight about?

The characters in Safelight are tough, as one would envision New Yorkers to be. Tough ‘til the end. Though none of them are developed to any great extent, we learn who they are and how they are wired effectively enough to hold the story together. They are thoroughly believable from my perspective: I’m a photographer, I live in a big city, I work at a hospital, and I have a (possibly) less-than-wholesome interest in death.

Harlem, 1990

Set in the tenement neighborhoods of New York City in 1990, the book is part love story, part self-discovery. Frank gets into various forms of trouble, or rather, puts him into situations that seem unwise from an objective point of view. But really, we sometimes do things that are inexplicable, not only to the watching world, but to our own selves. Some of the things the characters do also seem inexplicable; though we know they can and do happen.

Reading this book is another one of those inexplicable things. It’s almost like you know there will be a bad outcome, but you keep reading, expecting some life-affirming philosophy at the end. In this regard, the book does not disappoint. I found it difficult to put down, perhaps because it appealed to me on so many levels. Paramedics would find the story technically accurate. Photographers will relate to Frank, especially if they’ve labored to find direction, reason, and an outlet for their work. No different, really, than the average person looking for and possibly finding direction. After reading Safelight, we’re tempted to look back on our own lives and consider that specific experiences may not have been mere distractions in our path, but rather guideposts. Could such an epiphany change the way we view future events?

The Writing Style

Safelight is Burke’s first novel. The writing is almost in journal, or diary form. Maybe what you’d expect in a paramedic’s notebook. It’s concise, almost terse writing style is engaging in that you know this chapter will not contain fluff. You expect the other shoe to drop at any time.

Summarizing Safelight

It seems to me the goal of the book is to make us think about why we do what we do. We see from chronologic narratives how lives are shaped by discreet events–birth, childhood, friendships, marriage, divorce, death. But we also see that only the first event, birth, is beyond our control. Whatever else happens to us is usually of our choosing. Things don’t happen to us so much as we choose our directions.

A book like this can make you feel a lot of things—like you are afraid to die, like you should appreciate the beauty in the world, like starting a new romance, be accepting of death. In the liner notes, Safelight is described as a “love story not for the faint of heart.” Sounds trite, but for me it meant that a love story doesn’t necessarily mean the couple will live happily ever after. Its optimism stems from the fact that life really only has one end. When we find ourselves at an impasse, stalled, or traumatized, we can think of how Helen Keller said that when one door closes, another opens.

You can now buy products with Celestial Angel (to the left) and Cemetery (featured in Death Depicted in Cemetery Symbolism – Part 2).Mugshots CoffeeHouse & Cafe
110 Cotton Street. Philadelphia, PA 19127
Just off Main Street in Manayunk
Phone: 215.482.3964
Check their website for hours and directions

Also, I’ll have two pieces in a show at Laurel Hill Cemetery from Sept. 9 – 30 including the piece to the left. In conjunction with Laurel Hill’s Spoon River reenactment (see below), the cemetery will host an exhibit of “Cemetery and Death-Related Art” in its gatehouse gallery. I’ve seen some of this – wow, and I thought I was odd…! You can also see other cemetery artifacts there. Laurel Hill is really an amazing place.

Check out Laurel Hill’s new website for hours and directions.

Fringe Festival Performance – The Late Laureates of Laurel Hill (Cemetery)

Spoon River is a book of fictitious epitaphs written by Edgar Lee Masters in 1915. Written as if the dead citizens of a Midwestern town are speaking from the grave, it has been adapted for theatre in the past–occasionally with a musical score added. As part of the 2006 Philly Fringe Live Arts Festival, a twilight reading of Spoon River will take place in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. See the Fringe Festival website for details.

I’d never have known of the existence of this little treasure if not for Ross Mitchell, Executive Director of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. During an interview with Ross, he mentioned that portions of the book will be re-enacted on the cemetery grounds during the Philadelphia Fringe Festival on September 9, 2006.

About Edgar Lee Masters

The author of this poetic odyssey, Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1950), was an enormously prolific American writer and poet. He is known mainly for Spoon River, his most popular work. Ezra Pound said “at last, America has discovered a poet” in reference to Masters. He author was dubbed “the natural child of Walt Whitman” by one critic, as his poetic style is similar to Whitman’s. (Whitman, by the way, is buried across the river from Philadelphia, at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden, NJ).

Structure of Spoon River

The book is essentially a collection of poems written by Masters, epigrams which detail the lives of the many residents of a fictitious midwestern town in the late 1800s. Though more about the human condition, the book is written with the town as a backdrop to 245 single-page monologues by the deceased – as if they wrote their own epitaphs. The poetry is free verse, sometimes beautiful, always poignant in its relation to the balance of life and death. Spoon River is deceptively light reading, but is not to be taken lightly.

After Death, Life Lamented

The epitaphs chronicle the aspirations and interactions, the defeats, the loves, lives, and deaths of these individuals. Most lament the fact that they were not appreciated, though a few are satisfied with their lives. Its timeless take-home message is that even in small-town America, nothing is ever as it seems.

Spoon River is an easy read, as most people’s lives are summed up in a page of poetry. It’s engaging because there are so many different personalities from so many walks of life. Whether it be the successful shopkeeper, the adulterer, unwed mother, or the poor but honest lawyer (Masters himself was a lawyer, serving with the famous Clarence Darrow’s law firm in the early 1900s), the reader is almost certain to relate to one.

Memorials to a Townspeople, Light on the Genealogy

Now townspeople of a different town, the inhabitants admit things about their lives that are a bit shocking, even to the contemporary reader. The book was highly controversial when it was first published (1915), causing quite a stir among political, literary, and religious conservatives. The experiences are loosely based on the small town in which Masters was born, one in which a bank collapse caused great turmoil. The book more than illustrates the trials and tribulations of people in rural America – it mirrors society in general and comments on all of our hypocritical behaviors. Families are loosely followed for two generations, but the book reads as though this entire fictional community passed on at the same time.

Life After Death (The Afterlife as a State of Melancholy)

The book provides interesting social commentary, sometimes amusing, usually melancholy. It reminds us of how one’s own epitaph can be so at odds with the printed obituary or verse carved onto a headstone, a diptych if there ever was! To paraphrase Masters, our true epitaphs are more lasting than stone. A great read for anyone interested in death and the afterlife.

Fringe Festival Performance – The Late Laureates of Laurel Hill (Cemetery)

Spoon River has been adapted to the stage in the past, even with musical scores added. As part of the 2006 Philly Fringe Live Arts Festival, a twilight reading of Spoon River will take place in Philadelphia’s Laurel Hill Cemetery. See the Fringe Festival website for details.

Artist Statement

“Cemetery and Penitentiary Photography” was the working title of this show. The actual title of the show became “Confinement in Solitude.” In this article I’m going to explain how I came up with that title. Here’s my Artist’s Statement for the show:

“Confinement in Solitude”

These words, used to describe Eastern State Penitentiary’s philosophy toward criminals, eerily parallel that of a cemetery. ESP’s original idea that freedom (from criminal behavior) could be achieved through confinement was less than successful. Isn’t everything about the tension between freedom and confinement? Cemetery angels vividly portray this–creatures of flight, frozen in stone.

I’d long been a fan of urban decay-beauty in detritus. Perhaps one reason I enjoy photographing old cemeteries and Eastern State Penitentiary is this oppressive attraction they both possess. But how to connect the two? Coming up with an Artist’s Statement is considerably more difficult than coming up with a title for an individual piece of artwork. I would rather eat bees than do either. Such contemplative writing requires more soul-searching, I believe, than the actual creation of the art itself. So much of the creative process is feeling, rather than overt planning. Like the artist N.C. Wyeth said, in order to create a successful piece of artwork, you must have an emotional connection with the subject. Agreed, but how do you put that into words?

I don’t particularly care for writing about my work because I feel I expose more of myself with words and I risk assigning specific meaning to my work. I’d rather leave it to individuals to find their own meaning in the art. For instance, if I took a picture of a pork chop, hung it in a gallery, and labeled it “Pork Chop,” most people wouldn’t look twice it at. They’d think, “Yep, that’s a pork chop alright.” On the other hand, if the same photograph were untitled, people might think that metaphorically, I’m commenting on the carnivorous nature of man, or space and the passage of time. Subconsciously, I might be. You get the idea.

So even though labels are for jelly jars, I am expected to come up with titles and Artist Statements. So how to make them relevant without giving away the farm? In analyzing the connection between angels and prisons, I gave up early on obvious titles, e.g. “Angels and Devils” (while there were angels in my photographs, the devils were only implied); “God’s Servants and Satan’s Minions” (a bit harsh on the shoplifters and other petty criminals who occupied Eastern State); or “Angels and Penitents.” That last one had promise.

Crime and Punishment in the Victorian Age

When the prison opened in 1829, its founders believed that solitude would “make the criminal regretful and penitent” (hence the new word Penitentiary added to our language). Legislation specifying “separate or solitary confinement at labor” was passed. This correctional theory, as practiced in Philadelphia, became known as the Pennsylvania System, and it became world-famous.

In 1913, The Pennsylvania System of confinement with solitude was abandoned at Eastern State. The system had actually broken down decades earlier, prompted by Charles Dickens’ criticism of the philosophy. He visited the United States in 1842 to see Niagara Falls and Eastern State Penitentiary–two wonders of the Victorian world. He later wrote, “The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong…”

So Eastern State’s original concept of freedom (from criminal behavior) through confinement, failed. Stone walls, like stone wings, fail to ascend the arc to freedom.

Death and Mourning in the Victorian Age

Founded in the Victorian 1830s, both Eastern State Penitentiary and the great garden cemeteries like Laurel Hill (Philadelphia) speak volumes about American societal beliefs and norms at the time. Both are examples of our attempt to come to terms with the undesirable realities of death and crime–we confine them both in solitude. We reward them with burial and imprisonment, respectively –”interment” vs. “internment.” Both Eastern State and Laurel Hill were architectural wonders created in a rural setting–Philadelphia had not yet grown to reach them. Penitence and mourning practices both reached stellar proportions in that era (when a family member died, the official mourning period usually lasted a year, during which time ritualistic wearing of black clothing was observed), as did the epic flourish of angels and other ornate cemetery statuary.

Funny how the words interment and internment get confused. Interment is burial; internment is simply imprisonment. If you had asked the inmates at Eastern State to compare their confinement in solitude with that of those interred at Laurel Hill, they may not have thought the difference appreciable. They may have felt like the stone angels–or as T.E. Lawrence would say, “the living knew themselves just sentient puppets on God’s stage.” To me, cemetery angels vividly portray the tension between freedom and confinement that inmates at Eastern State must have felt. This tension between freedom and confinement–isn’t that what life is all about?

Stoneangels: As far as actually getting to Laurel Hill, you can see it from Roosevelt Boulevard, but you have no idea how to get in!

Ross Mitchell: Yes, thousands drive by every day on Kelly Drive, but the entrance is on Ridge Avenue. The neighborhood was not inviting in years gone by, although there’s definitely a change happening. The part of the cemetery that most people see is the Kelly Drive and Hunting Park intersection, but you can’t enter there-and you can only see a little sliver of the cemetery. You have no idea what’s above on the cliffs [overlooking the Schuylkill River]. The cemetery was built up here for the scenic vistas-the rural garden cemetery movement usually called for a lake-we have a river.
Stoneangels: Is there any plan to change the entrance to make it more accessible?

Ross Mitchell: We plan to improve the signage. The East Falls Economic Development Corporation has a grant for signage so hopefully we will be able to get listed on their signage on Kelly Drive. We are working on making East Falls a more desirable destination in general. We look at ourselves as the “Gateway to East Falls.”

Stoneangels: I see the new condos going up down the street.

Ross Mitchell: Hopefully they will bring a few thousand more people to the community. And with the Sherman Mills project up and running, East Falls will be a vibrant location with Laurel Hill as a cultural and ecological center uniting the community. In addition to increasing our signage on Kelly Drive, we want to reopen our Hunting Park gate and encourage joggers, bikers, and strollers who are going up Kelly Drive to make a little detour into the cemetery.

Stoneangels: I read in the “Stone in America” article that one of your first efforts to make Laurel Hill more accessible was to have it open on weekends. Personally, that was terrific for me! It was so hard for me to get in here; I really appreciated it.

Ross Mitchell: It was so hard to get in! Everybody works during the week and it was only open until noon on Saturday.

Stoneangels: Have you any parting words, Ross?

Ross Mitchell: People really need to come here and see Laurel Hill for themselves. They need to overcome their inhibition of ‘why would I want to visit a cemetery’ and realize that not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life. And you talk about, well, isn’t it disrespectful? If you look at the monuments and the sculpture in Laurel Hill you know these people wanted these monuments to be seen. They wouldn’t have spent thousands of dollars, in fact the largest mausoleum we have–the Disston mausoleum-in 1886 it cost $60,000 to build! A small modest mausoleum can easily cost $600,000 to a million dollars to build today.

Stoneangels: Why is it that people don’t build monuments and mausoleums anymore?

Ross Mitchell: People are building mausoleums today…at our sister cemetery, West Laurel Hill in Bala Cynwyd, there were three or four mausoleums built last year. But many people are not as rooted as they once were, with the mobility we have, people move all the time. We have large lots that are owned by families, but the family has spread out over the country. And many people are cremating nowadays, they’re not as rooted to the city, they’re not as rooted to the earth.

Stoneangels: Let me ask you about Sylvester Stallone and shooting the opening scenes of [the upcoming movie] “Rocky VI,” at Laurel Hill. Tell me about that.

Ross Mitchell: I wasn’t here. I was on vacation! (laughs). I did meet him when he came here before the shoot. He lived in Philadelphia for a number of years, and he loves Laurel Hill, so they shot here. He is on our Honorary Committee for our Gravedigger’s Ball.

Stoneangels: Does that mean he might come?

Ross Mitchell: I hope he comes and what I’d like to get him to do is autograph a pair of boxing gloves that we can auction off in our silent auction. How great would that be?! They had a stone made for Adrian, and they donated it to the cemetery. We have it mounted; if you go right around the corner (Adrian.jpg), right around the other side of the [gatehouse] building, it’s there all on its own.

Stoneangels: Where did they do the shooting?

Ross Mitchell: It was over on the south side, right across from Pemberton [John, Lieutenant General in the Confederate Army]; they got some good river views.

Stoneangels: Frank [Rausch, Laurel Hill staff member] told me the stone was engraved incorrectly?

Ross Mitchell: Yeah, Bill [Doran, Laurel Hill's Superintendent] had to get it re-done at the last minute.

Stoneangels: Old Mortality-type work.

Ross Mitchell: And we’re also going to be involved with the Fringe Festival. We are going to have a program here, have you ever heard of the Spoon River Anthology? You need to read this! By Edgar Lee Masters. It is a series of epitaphs, people speaking from the grave and gossiping about one another. And it’s so interesting; it’s really quite a good read. It’s everybody lamenting their losses and what they didn’t do in life, or bragging. It’s everybody from a made-up Mid-western town speaking from the grave, talking about themselves, and what they accomplished or didn’t accomplish and talking about each other! So we’re going to have group of poets and actors reading from Spoon River in the cemetery at dusk.

Stoneangels: Life after death–hiding behind the tombstones?

Ross Mitchell: We are working out the details – people will be invited to bring their chairs and blankets, and then we’re going to have an art show and reception next door, with some relevant art.

Stoneangels: That’s in September, right?

Ross Mitchell: Right after Labor Day, September 9th.

Next: Visiting Laurel Hill: Why The Cemetery Is A Celebration of Life

Stoneangels: You have an artifact exhibit in the building next door-I remember seeing things when we were over there taking donated items down to the Gravedigger’s Ball auction.

Ross Mitchell: Actually it is a museum, an exhibit. We have incredible archives going all the way back to 1836. We have everything-we have all the obituaries, letters, we have maps, blueprints, glass plates, we have photographs going back as far as… photography goes back! We have the copper plates for all the ads going way back, we have journals. We have a Mitchell’s International Almanac from 1850 with maps of Philadelphia and New York. New York City stops at Houston Street near the [Greenwich] Village.

Stoneangels: So what was below Houston Street?

Ross Mitchell: That was the city! The city was below Houston! There was nothing above it! There was no Midtown Manhattan! I saw another old Philadelphia map. You know why it’s called Robin Hood Dell? This was the old Ridge Road [in front of Laurel Hill], and there was an old tavern called the Robin Hood Tavern right next to the cemetery. They named the Robin Hood Dell for the Robin Hood Tavern. We’d love to display more of our collection, if we had the time and manpower.

Stoneangels: I’d be happy to volunteer to help. I’ve been locked in the safe a couple times and have seen your rooms of artifacts and records. Years ago I needed to open my camera back to un-jam a roll of film, so I asked Leo, the person working at the front desk, if he thought the vault was light tight. He offered to lock me in and it worked great! Sometimes you just have to trust people…

Stoneangels: Let me ask you about Tiffany stained glass in the mausoleums. Do you know if there is any?

Ross Mitchell: There were! There were seven Tiffany stained glass windows and in the 1970s an article came out identifying where all the Tiffany stained glass windows were across the country in cemeteries. Within a number of years, they were all stolen. But apparently Tiffany keeps very detailed records and photos of all of their products. We are in the process of contacting them to get copies of those images that I will post on the Stolen Art Network. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get them back and maybe not.

Stoneangels: In 1999 a Tiffany stained glass window worth $660,000 was stolen from a mausoleum in Brooklyn.

Ross Mitchell: Wow. All of our missing windows have been replaced with glass block. Nothing is less romantic.

Stoneangels: At least you didn’t do what they did in West Philly where they replaced them with cinder block!

Ross Mitchell: That could be less romantic. When you look into a mausoleum and the sun is coming through the stained glass it really is a very special event.

“…not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life.”

Stoneangels: I only recently started appreciating the subtler things in cemeteries like the stained glass.

Ross Mitchell: One of the tours we’ve been talking about doing is having our superintendent Bill Doran, who is this great Irish stonemason give a “Behind the Scenes” tour of the cemetery. He’s got all of these great stories about working here. Like the time he was working in one of the mausoleums. One of the crypt covers had fallen off so he was doing some repair work in it and it was totally dark in there and the door closed and he heard this noise behind him! He just ran out of there! Apparently it was a fox or opossum that had gotten into the crypt. He said he was never so scared in his whole life!

Stoneangels: I can’t picture anything scaring Bill!

Ross Mitchell: Neither could I. He has these great stories about the logistics of working in the cemetery. The “Behind the Scenes Tour with the Superintendent” is not on the schedule yet but we’re working on it.

Next: Ghost Stories and the Filming of Rocky VI

Stoneangels: You said death was more common in the 1800s?

Ross Mitchell: The life span was much shorter back then. And before there were antibiotics, people lost children all the time. We have one lot here where [a family] lost eight children in ten years, all under the age of ten.

Stoneangel: They weren’t all stillborn babies?

Ross Mitchell: No, colds would come around, infections would happen and there were no antibiotics. So people died [earlier]. People were laid out in the parlor. In fact I believe that’s one of the reasons they started calling it the “living” room instead of the parlor because the parlor waxs associated with where you would lay out the body when you had a death in the family. So “living” room…

Stoneangels: As opposed to the funeral “parlor.” I brought my daughter here when she was about fifteen-we used to come here together to take photographs. She was surprised to see so many tombstones of children who had died before they were 6 months old. She couldn’t understand why so many children had died that young. It was a great history lesson for her. Hanging around here, I think in some way helped me prepare myself for my father’s death. I have a small family and I was not used to grief and death. But I knew it was inevitable. So I appreciate Laurel Hill from that respect.

Ross Mitchell: One of the programs we’re developing here is in conjunction with St. Joseph’s University [Philadelphia], an Urban Mourning Rituals Program-that’s the working title now. It’s an outreach program into the local community. Unfortunately, with all the shootings that we’re having in Philadelphia–a lot of youth-on-youth murder–everybody in the city knows somebody who’s been shot. So we’re working on developing a program that’s based on the spontaneous memorials–spontaneous roadside memorials that happen, and the Rest In Peace memorials at murder sites, the spray-painted memorial on the back windows of cars, Rest In Peace spray-painted memorial t-shirts, sort of graffitied, modern urban rituals. These are a natural outgrowth of loss and of people trying to deal with loss.

So with Professor Berndt, from St. Joseph’s University, we’re developing a program to go out into the community to help children understand what these mourning rituals are, what they’re for and to help children deal with their loss. We’ll come to Laurel Hill as part of the program–we have 170 years of mourning rituals here and can help kids understand and work through their unfortunate losses.

Next: Behind the Scenes: Historical Archives at Laurel Hill