I am not and never have been a powerful white man. My retirement from teaching studio art coincided with a worldwide pandemic and the close of tyrannical rule in the United States. In the last 18 months, for refuge and fresh air I traveled locally in St. Louis to Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum to explore and reflect. I took my camera on the journey. .
The only way to get to the grounds from my home is to drive through neighborhoods that are terribly neglected and disenfranchised. The cemetery is now protected by surveillance cameras, 24-hour security personnel, and gates that are promptly locked at 5:00 p.m. In the original design of the place were three gates but two are now permanently locked, a way to now keep the neighborhood from encroaching.
I found in an outdated typed guide of Bellefontaine cemetery a brief but revealing statement on the past. It states “In this cemetery are buried many men and women whose lives contributed conspicuously to the westward growth of our country, and a visit to their graves may give us a keener appreciation of our national heritage.”
Bellefontaine Cemetery historians have recently gone to great lengths to highlight the achievements of women buried there, such as American abolitionist Mary Meachum and Dr. Helen Nash, the first female African American to join the faculty at Washington University School of Medicine here in St. Louis. But not far from their graves are Confederate generals, slave owners and ruthless businessmen who were bastions of industry. Their graves, in glory and decay, now represent to me the strong and long hold of autocracy in the United States.
The images I have made at Bellefontaine depict the illusion of supremacy, the impermanence of monuments and the evidence of a profound shift in the city where I reside.
My photographs of graves, mausoleums and the cemetery grounds began to speak a different language than I have ever heard. Recent years have caused me to look through the lens differently, influenced by the symbols of tyranny. The images at once capture the legacy of grandeur the departed intended to leave behind as well as the cruelty that surrounds us all.
The pictures are not pretty nor do they necessarily speak directly about oppression. There are plenty of photographers who do that very well and bring to the work a first-hand knowledge of . My images ask viewers to bring their own wonder to the work. My project looks is a study of design, decline, and decay. I am documented something erected as permanent now slowly failing. More than just documentation, the images attempt to evoke response.
I believe that digital photography today reinvents and redefines itself every day. Digital storage, a study in permanence, is cheap as it gets. The photographer now has the ability to shoot thousands of images per minute. For me, the act of photographing has stayed somewhat the same since I took a zone system/math class in college. I have recently purchased a camera that has a very sensitive light sensor and I see now the zone system influence in many of my digital images. Exposing for highlights and processing for shadows has influenced my now digital world. This too is a juxtaposition of elements of change and monuments, permanence. I’ve lived long enough in this white, male body to select from the past what is worthy of saving from decay, and to let toppled monuments speak for themselves.