In
the mid 1990’s American photographer David Robinson published two books of
cemetery photographs; Saving Graces, with
a foreword by Joyce Carol Oates, in 1995 was followed by Beautiful Death in 1996. The two books are very different - Saving Grace, published by W.W. Norton is an A5 paperback of black and white
photographs of the 19th century allegorical
female forms that adorned tombs in continental cemeteries. Beautiful Death, subtitled
Art of the Cemetery and published by Penguin Books USA, is a large format
hardback of colour photos, again almost exclusively of 19th century European cemeteries
but featuring a wider range of memorials than its predecessor.
“When
I was photographing in Pere Lachaise and other European cemeteries,” Robinson
says in his afterword, “I soon became aware of women all around me. We are
familiar with the image of widows dressed in black bending over to tend family
graves.....but these were not the women who attracted my attention. Instead I
found myself transfixed by gorgeous young women who were not dressed in black. In
fact many were hardly dressed at all, and although exquisitely beautiful, they
were visibly distraught.” These statues which adorn the graves of the haute bourgeoisie
through most of West and Central Europe Robinson dubs the ‘Saving Graces’ “because
of their beauty and their beneficence”. In her introduction Joyce Carol Oates notes
that these figures are “classically austere and occasionally featureless, at
one extreme, at the other, romantically voluptuous, barely clothed, in some
cases starkly nude, lying, like the lovely figure gracing the cover of this
book, in a pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of
erotic surrender.” Staid Victorian Anglo-Saxons would have been perplexed,
appalled and aroused in equal measure by these eroticised representations of
grief and the fashion never caught on on this side of the English Channel. There are just two photos from London
cemeteries – one at Highgate from the classically austere end of the spectrum and
the other the highly untypical memorial to Ninon Michaelis in Kensal Green by
Henry Alfred Pegram. Although he was born in 1862 Pegram died in 1937 and both
the Michaelis memorial and the even more spectacular statue at Golders Green
Crematorium, Into The Silent Land, are
early twentieth century works. Pegram would have been considered rather old
fashioned in European artistic circles; it had essentially taken more than
half a century for a pair of sculpted naked shoulders to be considered acceptable in a London
cemetery.
The
most arresting image in the book, and the one chosen for the cover, is a white
marble statue from Staglieno cemetery in Genoa of a completely naked woman, a
conveniently placed swag of shroud or winding sheet falling modestly across her
loins in Oates “pose of swooned, vulnerable abandon, as if grief were a form of
erotic surrender”. Going by the evidence of the book it is the Italians who
pushed the boundaries at the erotic end of the Saving Graces spectrum. The
photographs are stunning; tightly composed and beautifully lit. The decision to
shoot in monochrome seems absolutely right for the subject. The book is out of
print but second hand copies are easy to find and generally very modestly
priced. Highly recommended.
‘Beautiful
Death’ is largely shot in the same cemeteries as ‘Saving Graces’ and even
includes a number of the same monuments but the photos are in colour and cover
the whole spectrum of memorials from simple headstones up to the most elaborate
mausoleums and funerary sculptures. The book includes a ‘text’ by Dean Koontz
the prolific American author of gothic thrillers. Koontz’s contribution to the
project isn’t billed as an introduction or a foreword or preface probably
because the words seem to have little connection to Robinson’s pictures of 19th
century cemetery art. His 5000 word riff on death is quite interesting. “Death,”
he says “is not beautiful, going on to
describe what sounds more like Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of death, rather than
any phenomenon that would have been recognised by the bourgeoisie of fin de siècle
Paris or Milan; “he has the emotionless face of the unloving void, eyes as
blank as polished granite, and a heart of maggots.” His revelations on the
deaths of his parents are fascinating but completely out of place in this book.
Robinson wasn’t keen on including all this but Penguin were not going to
decline any involvement from a best selling author they felt so sure would help
them shift large quantities of the book that they ordered an initial print run
of 50,000 copies. It wasn’t the first time Robinson had had a project hijacked
by a writer; his first book was to be a monograph of reflection shots taken in
Italy. At the suggestion of Gore Vidal, who had declined the project, he went off
to solicit help from Anthony Burgess. The author of ‘A Clockwork Orange’ was
then living 40 miles from Rome with his Italian wife and was enthusiastic about
the work of the young American photographer. When Robinson shyly asked if he
would consider writing the introduction to his proposed book Burgess roared
“"No, no," before adding; "This deserves something more; this
deserves a novel!" Poor Robinson just wanted a preface from a well known
author to help him sell his book. What he got was ‘Beard’s Roman Women’, a
novella which featured 17 of Robinson’s photographs in the first American and
UK editions. Subsequent editions
“quietly dropped” the photos he later
remembered but “I ended up making more money on Beard's Roman Women than on any
of my other books because I was on Burgess' pay schedule.”
Robinson
makes up for the deficiencies of Koontz’s text by supplying his own ‘Afterword’
which attempts to put his photographs in context by cantering through the
history of burial practices since the middle ages and the development of the
cemetery movement in Europe. He essentially rehashes Philippe Ariès’ arguments
from ‘The Hour of Our Death’ but manages to make some inexcusable factual
errors in the process. The old Parisian cemetery of Les Innocents closed in
1875 he says. Anyone who has read Andrew Miller’s ‘Pure’ knows that that date
is at least a hundred years out – it was the closure of Les Innocents in 1780 and
the subsequent exhumation and removal of the bodies to the catacombs that
provided much of the impetus to open Pere Lachaise. He lists correctly the
dates of the opening of the principal Paris cemeteries but for some reason completely
fluffs the London ones claiming, incorrectly, that Highgate opened in 1836 and
Kensall (sic) Green in 1838. Highgate actually opened in 1839 and Kensal (one ‘l’
please) Green in 1833.
But I suspect no one buys this
book for the words, whether they are from Koontz or from Robinson himself. What
matters are the pictures and they are very good indeed. They were shot in
cemeteries all over Europe though France and Italy predominate. There are just a handful of pictures from
London cemeteries – 3 from Highgate, one from Brookwood and a single shot each
from Chiswick and the catholic cemetery of St Mary’s, Kensal Green. If you
discount Hogarth’s memorial in the background of the photo from Chiswick, none
of the London images focuses on well known or spectacular memorials. Instead
they focus on ordinary headstones, wild flowers, a bird box or a clutch of saints
purchased from off the monumental mason’s shelf. London may have some spectacular
memorials in it’s cemeteries but Robinson says that he was looking for the
typical in the cemeteries of all the countries he visited; he is right, what is
common in the Parisian or Italian cemeteries is pretty untypical in London. For
me some of the best shots in the book are these quieter images – the beautifully
hand coloured 19th century photos adorning Italian graves, the bizarre and
brightly coloured ceramic cat with the word ‘Ricardo’ blazoned across its chest
glowing amongst the mausoleums in a Spanish cemetery or snow blanketing the
reclining figure on a chest tomb. Penguin’s decision to go for an initial print
run of 50,000 hardbacks means that you can pick up very cheap copies of this
now out of print title. They can be bought for as little as £2.99 on Abebooks.
They would be cheap at 10 times the price.
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