I’ve been a grave yard lurker for a couple of decades; with a camera that is. I’ve photographed cemeteries in almost every country that I’ve visited. (One that escaped me was a barren rocky plateau at 20,000 feet in the western Tibet which was reserved for sky burials. A sky burial is where your earthly, dead corpse is left out for the birds (think big Asian vultures) to pick over, resulting in your soul’s release and hitching a ride heavenward in the bird’s belly. Periodically, someone comes along and sweeps the bone’s over the ledge.)
Anyway, the image below was made in Alcamo, Sicily. It’s the grave of a young Sicilian girl who died as a teenager, from what I’m not sure. The red flower in the fore ground stopped me, and I paused for a while before and after I made this exposure. It’s one of my favorite cemetery images. Initially, I was going to pair it with the dog image from my last post because of the red blossoms, but the colors just didn’t work for me.
Sicilian cemeteries are like Italian confectionary; they’re in a class of their own. For me they are an irresistible visual overload. They’re usually densely packed, often stacked high with mausoleums, ornately populated with statues, reliefs, photographic images of the dead frozen in ceramic permanence, and grandly carved monuments. And all of this is smiled upon by Christendom’s grace, and blessed by the local priest’s enduring promise of a throughly peaceful, eternal rest. I guess Catholics aren’t very concerned about the prevention of their souls ascent or descent by several tons of stone sitting upon their mortal remains.
This cemetery is about as diametrically opposed to an ornate Italian cemetery as you can get. It was on Ambergris Cay off the coast of Belize. I call it sand burial. The Belizean coast is subject to nasty hurricanes. I can only imagine a storm surge coming up and over this little grave yard and wiping the slate clean. It would be kind of like a watery recycling of the dead.
And the last image isn’t a cemetery at all. It’s a Nepalese crematorium outside of Kathmandu. Most of the population is Hindu who rightly believe in cremating the dead. Their method of choice is a funeral pyre. When they have several pyre’s going simultaneously, it kind of smells like Bar-B-Que with too much charcoal starter.
Anyway, Happy Easter everyone and think resurrection.
