Eugene Richards - Remembrance Garden

“The cemetery seizes your mind. After wandering around here for three years, I’d pretty much lost the need to take pictures, but kept returning, the last time to search for the gravestones and statues in the pictures I’d already taken” Eugene Richards writes in the afterward of his new book, “Remembrance Garden – A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery”. Besides presenting a collection of the photographs he took over that period, the book includes several personal remembrances as well as a collection of the epitaphs he encountered. The epitaphs cover the full history of the cemetery and range from LIEUT. CLAUTON SHOLES, Born May 10, 1832 Died in Battle of Bull Run July 21 1861 to JEAN-MICHEL BASQUITAT Artist Dec 1960 Aug 1988.From the press release:
An exquisitely somber portrait of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery across the seasons
In March 2020, after suffering from a severe bout of Covid, Eugene Richards sought out a safe place to walk and recuperate, and became entranced with Brooklyn’s much-loved Green-Wood Cemetery. Founded in 1837 and proclaimed a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the 487-acre burial ground and arboretum is the final resting place of more than 550,000 people. Over the subsequent years, Richards made nearly 100 visits to Green-Wood, photographing both poetical details and grand vistas in rich color, across the seasons and in all weather, creating lyrical images of snowbound headstones, grand mausoleums, intimate epitaphs, the encroachments of moss on stone and the wear of time on all things. The photographs in Remembrance Garden were taken between April 2020 and September 2023. Richards intersperses his images with names and dates inscribed on grave markers and deeply personal memories, creating a grand and moving portrait of the legendary cemetery.
More information about the book is below.