The Brooklyn Rail

There’s something about cemeteries, drawing in the mall goth, the conceptual artist, and the Victorian era enthusiast. Posing next to random headstones was an initiation rite for a certain set of early-aughts Tumblr users. A certain string quartet is always emailing me about concerts in a crypt. The visual culture of mourning, of death dressed up, has captivated all kinds of aesthetes who want to use the signs and symbols of ghosts and crosses to make their point.

Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery, a new photobook from D.A.P., casts one specific cemetery—and one man’s relationship to it—as its subject. In the spring of 2020, at seventy-six years old and testing positive for coronavirus, award-winning photographer Eugene Richards took a walk in a place where he knew he’d be alone: Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, 478 acres of quiet inside a city known for chaos. Richards realized he’d touched on something, and on his nearly one hundred visits to Green-Wood over the next three years, he brought his camera with him.

Richards’s lens is alternately narrow and wide, and Remembrance Garden swings between them. On one page, a sweeping vista of gray headstones drooping into wet mulch; on the next, a granular crop of ants cling to the grooves of a marble face. The cemetery’s first burial was in 1840, signaled by the warped gravestones captured from all angles. Interspersed between the crisp digital photos are two written works: an original essay by Richards about experiencing the death of loved ones, and select inscriptions from Green-Wood headstones. Text blocks buffered by bountiful white space lay opposite what is inoffensive nature photography at its weakest, and portraiture of how our culture looks at death at its best.

It’s New York, so it’s also a real estate story, and this cemetery sees a better skyline than most apartments. The land is paid for, but its residents are underground. While it was acceptable to picnic in cemeteries a few centuries ago, now it is often prohibited. Some have begun to advertise as museums, establishing public programming to draw (living) people in. Green-Wood Cemetery, for example, is in the middle of a twenty-five-year-long installation by French artist Sophie Calle that invites visitors to write down their deepest secret and drop it into a communal plot. While Richards calls attention to the service that a cemetery provides the living, his photos reflect a private engagement. No human features in Remembrance Garden, besides the deceased memorialized in cracked cameos or photorealistic etchings.

Except there—in one photo, a glimpse of a maybe-person with a baby stroller along the path that bifurcates the image. I almost missed her. Shrouded by grasses in the foreground as if Richards sunk into a ditch to get the shot, she is part of the dark vignette around the real characters: three proudly jutting columns silhouetted against a stark and depthless sky. Smudges—fog on the lens?—muddy the statues’ clean lines, melting into the twisted thicket. It’s a removed image, and so intentionally romantic, that the wisps of moisture recall a sappy movie making rain on a windowpane an allegory for tears. I could see Green-Wood using it as a postcard, its gloomy palette evoking warm feelings about donating to the upkeep of this curious place.

On days when the cemetery seemed to him particularly striking, the inscriptions were all Richards needed to envision the people buried there. “They’d take over my thinking,” he writes in the afterword. “Crouched down in front of the grave markers of the Civil War dead I’d hear muffled explosions, men groaning, calling for help.” But the Remembrance Garden photos don’t provoke imagination of the layers of vibrant life that lay beneath the earth. Richards is a documentarian first, and his late-career photos remain faithful to capturing what’s visible in front of him. Luckily, gothic design is plenty fascinating, as is the passage of time. Richards identifies the rich tension between the natural and the man-made: A gravestone peeking out from the tree trunk that subsumed it. The jolly flock of Canada geese waddling past a marker reading “FATHER.” (Geese feature prominently in the photographs.) The red roses in a field of green, or a blue mylar balloon on a bed of snow. All the mold upon the chiseled stone.

Richards photographed Green-Wood through all four seasons. The shock of a red maple and pink confetti magnolia petals are pretty marvels, but if going by the book, the cemetery is in top form at wintertime. We could be in conversation with Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph, the image of the philosopher’s mother that is described but never shown in Camera Lucida. “The photograph does not call up the past,” Barthes writes. “The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.” Richards’s glamor shots of Green-Wood Cemetery already mark a moment in time since passed.

In the moment of the photograph, no subject is less dead or more alive than any other. The last time I was at Green-Wood was before Richards started Remembrance Garden. I met a friend there on a newly cold afternoon in December 2019 and took a picture of her mid-step as we trudged up and down the hills and wandered between headstones. In my photo, the sunlight finds her red hair, a bare tree’s topmost branches, and the wing of an angel bent in prayer. One day I’ll use it to remember how beautiful it all was.