There is a place in every story which the audience inhabits. It does not matter if the story is being told with words, with images, with music, or with dance. There is a place for the audience to linger in the act of imagination. We project ourselves into the narrative and feel along with the characters or situation.
This is the essential power of storytelling. We experience sympathy, learn empathy, and connect with people, thoughts, and feelings that are oftentimes new or at least unfamiliar. We grow, and we learn. We find ourselves part of a community larger than we had imagined before.
“Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery” by Eugene Richards
Published by D.A.P., 2024
review by W. Scott Olsen
This is particularly true of narrative photography.
We look at an image, and we wonder: what’s going on here? What is my personal relationship to what I’m seeing? How can I come to understand the lives of the people that may be explicitly or implicitly described by the image?
With a photo book, we find ourselves contemplating an image and, frankly, dreaming. We dream ourselves into the space provided by the image. We find ourselves unfolding and questioning, interrogating, and affirming. This dream space can be a source of deep and rewarding emotional richness.
I’m thinking about this because I have a book by Eugene Richards on my desk today called Remembrance Garden, A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery. Yes, cemeteries have been creative inspiration for photographers for a very long time, and the subject can easily lead to cliché and sentimentality. Yet, there is something about eternity, and our relationship to it, which has always been and perhaps will always be compelling.
There’s something about the two-direction, back over a life and forward into eternity, the implication in which we want to participate. In coming to understand a tombstone, we learn the name and the dates of somebody we do not know and we ask, as if we had any choice: who was this? What were they like? What did they do? What were their loves? What were their challenges?
This book by Richards is an extraordinary contemplation of a cemetery and the stories that surround it.
In an Afterword, he writes,
There were days I found Green-Wood so beautiful—the flowering trees, the mist low on the fields, the geese flying over—that I’d lose all sense of where I was walking. Then there were days when all I’d manage to do was go a few steps before stopping to read an inscription on a gravestone: name, birthdate, date of his or her death, epitaph. Seldom more than that. This wasn’t a lot of information, but it was enough for me to envision the lives of the people buried there. They’d take over my thinking. Crouched down in front of the grave markers of the civil war dead I’d hear muffled explosions, men groaning, calling for help…
The photographs in “Remembrance Garden” were taken between April 2020, and September 2023 in Brooklyn New York’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Founded in 1837 and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the 487-acre burial ground is the final resting place of 600,000 people.
But Remembrance Garden is not simply a documentary of a cemetery which includes Civil War tombs. It is much more personal, much more compelling.
The book begins with a personal narrative. The opening page reads:
“Hands shaking, temperature 103. The days were not much different than the nights,”
That’s the whole page. No image. Just words centered on the page. The next page reads:
“then the fever lifted. I was still having difficulty breathing, but needed to move, get out of the house,”
That’s all the text, on the left-hand side of the spread. On the right side here is an image of cemetery statuary, in a snowstorm.
So, what we have at the beginning of this book is a narrator, a character, an author, coming out of physical distress and needing to escape. He goes, and our eyes and emotions go, to a cemetery. Not a pastoral scene of beauty, though. The image is cold, hard, black and white. It’s an emotional hit.
The images in Remembrance Garden are not the usual cemetery images. A great many of them are taken in bad weather—rain, wind, deep snow—and from the beginning we have two, braided, narrative threads. We have the portrait of the physical cemetery—the statuary, the monuments, the relationship to each other and the hillsides in which they are placed–and we have the personal narrative of the author in crisis.
The text in the book soon changes, though. The left-hand pages become quotes from gravestones. Nothing more. A group bunched together into a paragraph. Just as if we were standing in Green-Wood ourselves, we are left to wonder who these people were. The book evokes an echo of lives we can only imagine.
What do people choose to put on their grave markers? The quotes in Remembrance Garden do not provide answers but open all sorts of avenues for thought.
“For 20 years, faithful servant killed The Second Battle of Bull Run…”
“If tears could build a stairway and memories a lane, I would walk right up to heaven and bring you home again…”
“Fifty years a bride and the mother of 12, her dear form lay beneath this tomb…”
This third narrative strand is remarkable. The book gives us the visual portrait, and the author’s narrative, and then a third strand of what should probably be called a chorus—all of these voices, all of these messages, all of these remembrances. And soon you realize that the chorus of the dead is a chorus of grief, but also a chorus of hope.
In the author’s narrative, his mother passes away, and what we get are scenes with his father. There is a section of what I believe is the father’s voice, trying to remember, wondering what’s essential: a wedding ring; makeup. Then, there are scenes of gathering and coping.
What happens with this book is that extraordinary moment where you turn a page, view an image, consider the text, and after a little while, realize ten minutes have passed and you’ve not turned to the next page. You are dreaming yourself into the story,
The images in Remembrance Garden run the whole gamut. There are landscape shots from some distance. There are details and close ups. The images include all four seasons, with lots of bad weather, although the book also quietly moves from the opening shot of hard winter into images of melting snow, springtime and summer.
There is an image of a tree engulfing a tombstone, images of worn and eroded headstones, fresh flowers on a grave, headstones tilted from settling into the earth. There are images of photographs people leave, evocative in the way that a face can reveal personality. There are images of geese wandering through the cemetery and red roses placed in a glass. Winged angels abound. Some of the scenes are crowded. Some are solitary. All speak to love and loss and hope for some kind of remembrance.
The images have that peculiar quality of appearing serendipitous when, in fact, if you spend some time with them, you realize how carefully framed each image is and how carefully chosen the details are.
Remembrance Garden is an emotion-wracking book. We have the intimacy and the grief of the author’s story paired with the implications of the tombstone sayings. And we have the power of the images themselves. Each amplifies the others.
Remembrance Garden is not a photo book you can scan. You cannot pick this one up, look at couple pages, and then meander off to some other task. Spend some time with this book and the very best thing will happen. You will dream yourself toward a community we will all join. Sooner or later.
A note from FRAMES: Please let us know if you have an upcoming or recently published photography book.