We were recently visiting friends in the Catskills. During the early morning I would take the car and explore a bit. I stopped and walked through some old cemeteries and besides the quiet and the stillness of them I saw how beautiful the surfaces were of the old stones. So I took pictures of some of them. I'm trying in new work to use some of these textures, colors and surfaces.

In taking the pictures and reading the inscriptions I was struck by how many children were buried in these cemeteries. A children's section in one of them.

No news in that life was difficult in the early 1800's for children but what stuck me particularly in standing in front of these children's stones was that how much grief and tears, more than likely, would have been concentrated in those particular places...it felt a bit as if time was frozen and you could feel those grieving people's presences if you just reach across. And I don't mean that in terms of the supernatural but more in a visceral, human feeling of empathy for such a loss.

Recent Photographs Aug 08                                                       Top