This picture is from 2006, 12 years ago, but I’ve been back to Mt. Zion a few times since. This is the yard where John Yang collected his series of sepulchral portraits, published in 2001. I discovered his book only after my own enthusiasm for gravestone portraits had been ignited, though it should have stopped surprising me by then that any idea I think I have that is unique or even unusual has likely been done, done, and redone already. Still, my reasons for being interested in the portrait I collected seemed to differ enough from others that at least my presentation of them could be said to have distinguished my collection from others. I was interested in the style of photography and portraiture, which I think makes people look more real than they do in the modern All Smiles genre of headshots and portraits.
Mt. Zion, Maspeth
One complaint about Yang’s book is that it included no meaningful information about the people shown in the portraits. I’ve been over and over in my mind and on the pages of this website about the morals of capturing photos of tombstones and the portraits sometimes found thereon, and I am no closer to resolution on what it means or who benefits from it. Did those who are now buried want to be lifted from the relative obscurity of the graveyard and onto a computer network with advertisements for undertaker services slapped all around their images? Why do we assume anyone who died in the 1900s actually wanted to be lifted from where they expected to spend eternity onto a global network they likely had no possible way of knowing would ever even exist? Do we blast them onto the network or just leave them there in peace, where they expected to have few visitors?
You could say I benefited because, for a number of years, genealogists and family tree tracers paid me to go out to some of New York’s cemeteries and get pictures of their ancestors’ and forebears’ tombstones. The nominal fee they paid was far less than it would cost these folks to travel here, and I found the pursuit satisfying. More times than not the stones I photographed had information on them not was not available anywhere else, and that was pretty cool when that happened. “Forensic Genealogist” is the highfalutin sounding name for the work, but I just called it “Cemetery Photographer”.
But this was bringing specific value to individuals attempting to put the pieces of a family history together, not just assembling gravestones and collecting them together on the arbitrary basis that they have portraits them. Why are the lives of those with portraits on their markers worthy of publication any more than the countless others whose markers have no photographs?
I left the Forensic Genealogist pursuit behind a long time ago. After a particularly biting correspondence with a woman in Iceland I had had enough of people not paying me the agreed-upon amount or, in the case of the Icelandic woman, blaming me for the fact that her ancestor had no gravestone and rudely refusing to pay me for my time on account of it. I leave out there my 200+ tombstones with transcribed inscriptions from Calvary Cemetery, in case anyone finds even one of them useful. The last cemetery I stepped into was Green-Wood in Brooklyn, but that was just happenstance that I took a D Train to 36th Street and unexpectedly found the other entrance to that mighty yard. I don’t remember having this thought at any time while in a cemetery, but this time all I could think was “Why would anyone want to be here? Any living person, that is…”
