Some years ago I commenced, with great enthusiasm, a collection of photos capturing images of the dead as seen in what are known as “Sepulchral Portraits” on tombstones at Calvary and other New York City cemeteries, including Mt. Zion, St. Michael’s, and Mt. Olivet.
The more I pursued this endeavor the more I found myself contemplating its existential ethics. What would these deceased individuals or their descendants think of such a thing? Assembling arbitrary and anonymous portraits does nothing to honor the legacy of those in the photographs, and in many cases I suspect the dead had no say in the decision-making process of what photo to use or even to append their image to their grave in the first place.
Certainly the infants and young children memorialized in this way had no say in the matter. Whose legacy is honored by placing images of deceased infants on the headstones? I would allow that such images serve as reminders to we walking mortals that we should not squander or dismiss as common this enviable gift of life. But is it not exploitative, and has the passage of time not made it more so by the fact that many of the tombstone inscriptions have faded into illegibility, making identity of the dead impossible?
And why choose to elaborately document stories and identities of these individuals simply because they had the means to pay for these photographic flourishes? On this basis I can at least allow that my principal interest in these images was not so much taphophilial as photographic. The style of early 20th-century portraiture is more rugged and natural when compared to the genre of today. Smiles in these portraits are rare, giving me the sense that I am seeing the real person and not a posed idealization.
Still, this does not serve as an excuse to elevate the legacies of these individuals over those not photographed. Indeed, I think that a focus on the æsthetics and idiosyncrasies of the genre make a stronger case for anonymizing these individuals just as we rarely know the names of fashion models or artwork subjects.
I captured dozens of these photos one afternoon and came home to research this genre of sepulchral portrait photography. I was hardly surprised to find that it is a popular interest among taphophiliacs and cemetery wanderers, with a couple of published books and countless web pages sharing images of these gravestone portraits in cemeteries around the world.
John Yang’s Mount Zion: Sepulchral Portraits and Forgotten Faces: A Window Into Our Immigrant Past represent the only two volumes of gravestone portrait collections I know of to have been published. The two volumes are quite different but I like them both. “Forgotten Faces” brings a comprehensive historical approach to the matter, summarizing techniques used in production of the ceramic pieces, and digging as deeply as possible into the stories behind the images.
Yang’s thin volume offers closeup photos of markers at Mt. Zion, a Jewish cemetery in Queens, capturing the sometimes brutally specific desecration committed against them by vandals. From the specificity of the damage one should easily conclude the perpetrators of these acts were motivated by antisemitism. I had noticed this as well, at Mt. Zion moreso than Calvary, that many of the portraits appeared to have been singularly and intentionally vandalized specifically to cut out the person’s face. It was more than a little unsettling to imagine witnessing such an act, where individuals with blunt instruments repeatedly and methodically attack these photos.
Desecrated Sepulchral Portrait
One image even looked like it might have been shot at with a gun, or burned with a blowtorch.
Desecrated Sepulchral Portrait
This too lengthy introduction brings me to poet Russ Perry, whose video “A Note To John Yang” crossed my radar completely by chance yesterday. In his introductory comments and short poem Perry addresses the issue of intention and centuries of hate that motivate vandals of modern times to deliberately chisel out the faces of the dead at Jewish cemeteries. It gave me pause to know I was not alone in my distaste for these vulgar acts, and it reminded me that the “millennia old maledictions” so perfectly expressed in Russ Perry’s poem are as poisonous today as in centuries past.
