Tag Archives: cemetery photographs

Upcoming book: Mourning by Lisa Kereszi

Published by Minor Matters, Mourning is photographer Lisa Kereszi’s long-awaited sixth photo book, which centers around her family’s gravesite in suburban Philadelphia. The large-scale edition, whose production is solely funded via crowd-sourcing, contains grids of images made remotely with a hunter’s trail camera during a mourning period of sorts.

The presale ends on 8/1/23, then the book will come out physically before the end of the year. Check out the link at the bottom to get a copy of this beautiful, powerful book.

Here’s an excerpt from Lisa’s essay in Mourning:

“Your dad died,” my four-year-old daughter said. Matter-of-factly. Looking me in the eye. It seemed to me a statement, but also a question, somehow. Maybe she was looking to me for a reaction, some guidance on how to feel?

I just replied, “Yes. My dad died.” I didn’t know what else to say. He was 64.

His last year had been one of shuffling, suffering, and mourning. His mother had died that May before, just shy of her 83rd birthday. His sister and her friend had been occupying the family home and continued to do so, changing the locks immediately after their mother’s death, and barring him – and anyone else related to him — from entering.

Instead of mourning and settling my grandmother’s estate as I had been asked to do by her, I was locked in a battle with my aunt, obsessively trying to recover as many of my Nan’s belongings from inside the mildewed home, as well as from local pawnshops, consignment shops and even the free store where she had sold and deposited items from the house.

Unable to settle my grandmother’s estate on my own terms, I acted efficiently and with purpose to have my father’s gravestone, etched with my earlier portrait of him in his beloved pink Caddy, mounted at the family plot before that year’s end. This I could achieve. But within weeks, it was knocked over. When I learned this, my first thought was that someone had toppled it. Someone random? Someone angry? My aunt or one of her friends? Or was it not set properly? Was it maybe a large animal that didn’t expect it in its path?

Flabbergasted, I had it fixed and from afar enlisted a small army to mount a trail camera that allowed me to keep tabs on the site. Over the course of seven months, I received from the camera daily visual missives that became part of my morning routine. I didn’t even notice that the year was set incorrectly at first, the type of human error that abounds every January 1st, and the days and weeks that follow. I was focused on what was in the frame.

I watched my paternal family plot through the changing times of day, and through the seasons. I saw who, and what, visited— a family of deer, a lounging squirrel, a fox, and some birds. The only humans walked dogs and kept the grounds neat. I saw the foliage sprout, the vines creep, the fog roll in and burn off, and snow dust the grass, then melt as the sunlight took over the darkness. But no mourners, no family appeared in the frame, unlike the traditional visits my Eastern European forebears once kept up, as evidenced by the photos in my grandfather’s scrapbooks of his family posing with graves in the rust belt of Pennsylvania.

One day there was a summer storm, and the branch bearing the trail cam fell. Like a patient anesthetized on a table, or a body laid out for viewing at a funeral home, my visual viewpoint was now pointed up towards the sky. One of my volunteer army, my mother, put it back up. Within days, the camera disappeared.

The Victorians considered one year the mourning period for a child who lost their parent. But since it was a difficult relationship, let’s call my seven months a fulfillment of that requirement. With the anxiety-quelling cellular device gone, I had lost control. My virtual graveside visits ended in July of 2019, and my recorded mourning period was cut short half a year before the world began a collective mass-mourning.

Things are not ever the same after a parent dies. Things are also not the same after a pandemic changes everything. Losing one’s overarching direction and sense of order of the universe leaves one orphaned and unmoored. It takes some getting used to.

The camera turned up a few years later, memory card intact. By then, I was finally able to visit in person and make sense of what had happened, admit that I was grieving, and decide that enough time had passed for me to gather my wits and largely move on. The best of the 3568 pictures fell into grid form, a means for the artist to control the content. I am a daughter, and a granddaughter, and I am the parent now. And, yes, Virginia, my dad is dead.

“This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it.” These words, etched onto my grandmother’s flat gravestone nearby, come from a prayer she always recited, and even copied into her diaries. The sun rises, and the sun sets. Every single day (at least it does for now).

MOURNING by Lisa Kereszi (12 x 18.5 inches, horizontal, HC with Japanese stab binding; 32 pages, 112 photographs) with an essay by Marvin Heiferman (of the @whywelook Instagram, which is his own visual manifestation in grieving his partner, an early loss from Covid-19) is being published by Minor Matters in Seattle, crowd-sourcing all production costs with a deadline of August 1, 2023. To join as co-publisher before the deadline and get your name printed in the back of the book, visit: https://minormattersbooks.com/collections/pre-sales/products/pre-sales-mourning-by-lisa-kereszi

You can also follow Lisa on Instagram.

Death’s Garden Revisited is available now!

I’m so excited to announce that my next cemetery book is available now.

Death’s Garden Revisited collects 40 powerful personal essays that explore 60 cemeteries — accompanied by 80 full-color photographs — to illustrate why people visit cemeteries. Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.

Genealogists and geocachers, travelers and tour guides, anthropologists, historians, pagan priestesses, and ghost hunters all venture into cemeteries in these essays. Along the way, they discover that cemeteries don’t only provide a rewarding end to a pilgrimage, they can be the perfect location for a first date or a wedding, the highlight of a family vacation, a cure for depression, and the best possible place to grasp history. Not to mention that cemetery-grown fruit is the sweetest.

You can see a preview below:

You can order your copy of the book in paperback or in hardcover directly from Blurb. The ebook is coming soon.

Contributors and Kickstarter backers: The books arrived earlier than expected. I’m getting those into the mail as soon as I can!

Death’s Garden Revisited

I’ve just now finished the final proofing for my next book, Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries. Today we’ll order a paperback proof to check the quality of the photos one last time, then I can order the books and start fulfilling the Kickstarter pledges. The book will be available to everyone else in October.

It’s such an exciting time. The genesis of this book began in 1994, when my friend Blair gave me a box of photos he’d taken in cemeteries. Automatism Press published the first book inspired by them in 1996 and ever since, I have wanted to do a sequel. This book exceeds all my expectations.

I cannot wait for everyone to see how beautiful this new book is. I knew the text was going to be powerful, emotionally affecting, and life-affirming, but Automatism Press had never done a full-color book before. The photos truly are all I had hoped.

If you are interested in preordering a copy, you can drop me a note via my bookshop and I will let you know when the books are available.

In the meantime, enjoy some of the photos from the book! My phone isn’t really doing them justice, but you can get the idea.

Old Stirling Cemetery, photographed by Ann Bollen.

Unnamed graveyard, photographed by Greg Roensch.

St. Stephen’s Cemetery, photographed by Emerian Rich.

The Kickstarter is Live

Death’s Garden Revisited went live on Kickstarter at 9 this morning. An hour later, it’s almost halfway funded already. I’m really excited about how this is developing.

For early backers — today only — there are discounts on both the 8×10 paperback and the hardcover coffee table book. You can check out those and the other rewards at: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries

If your pockets are deep, there are some exclusive rewards:

For $200, you could own both Death’s Garden Revisited, the new volume, and the original Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, which has been out of print for 25 years.

For $500, you and four friends could come meet me in Colma, California for an afternoon of cemetery exploration. (This tier includes hardcovers of Death’s Garden Revisited for each of you.)

For a mere $10,000, I will fly to anywhere in the continental US to tour your local cemetery and give a lecture on cemetery travel. (This tier includes 10 hardcovers of Death’s Garden Revisited for you to keep or raffle off.)

Death’s Garden Revisited is an anthology of cemetery essays from genealogists and geocachers, tour guides and travelers, horror authors, ghost hunters, and pagan priestesses about why they visit cemeteries.

Spanning the globe from Iceland to Argentina and from Portland to Prague, Death’s Garden Revisited explores the complex web of relationships between the living and those who have passed before.

Editor Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die and the death-positive memoir This Morbid Life. She was the editor of the award-winning Morbid Curiosity magazine.

Contributors include:

Cemetery writers/Genealogists/Historians: Anne Born, Barbara Baird, Carrie Sessarego, Carole Tyrrell, Erika Mailman, J’aime Rubio, Jo Nell Huff, Joanne M. Austin, Rachelle Meilleur, Sharon Pajka, Trilby Plants

Morbid Curiosity contributors: Benjamin Scuglia, Brian Thomas, Chris LaMay-West, George Neville-Neil, M. Parfitt, Paul Stansfield, Rain Graves

Horror authors: A. M. Muffaz, Angela Yuriko Smith, Christine Sutton, Denise N. Tapscott, E. M. Markoff, Emerian Rich, Frances Lu-Pai Ippolito, Francesca Maria, Greg Roensch, Mary Rajotte, Melodie Bolt, Priscilla Bettis, Rena Mason, Robert Holt, R. L. Merrill, Saraliza Anzaldua, Stephen Mark Rainey, Trish Wilson

Welcome to CemeteryTravel.com

Six or seven years ago, I had a brainstorm to create a video that would introduce CemeteryTravel readers to the cemetery where I grew up, the one that taught me to love graveyards. I quickly realized that I couldn’t film it by myself. Unfortunately, my kid wasn’t interested in serving as my camera person.

Another brainstorm later, I decided to ask my friend, collaborator, and former director Brian Thomas if he would shoot the video for me. When we were in college, I had the honor of appearing in some of Brian’s student films and I knew he has a gift with a camera. I asked him to shoot me gardening in front of my grandparents’ headstone and touching the Youell tree stump. He came up with all the other moving shots in this video.

We shot the footage in 2014 and there the project languished. Every so often I would open iMovie and take a stab at assembling the bits, but my lack of editing skill made the work highly frustrating and very depressing. The gulf between what I wanted and what I could manage was crushing.

It took another brainstorm to finally get the job done. Earlier this year, I approached my friend John Palisano, who had published the first edition of Wish You Were Here and created an amazing book trailer for me. I asked John if he would edit the raw footage together for me.

After John said yes, his son Leo got interested in the project and put together this lovely video. Leo edited the footage together, added some of my photos where pieces were missing — and then animated them, and put up with my niggling comments of shortening this piece or that. He chose the stone-grain typeface for the title cards. He added the blue jays from Brian’s original videos as intro and outro sound. He made the the video of my dreams at last.

I was literally incapable of making this video without their help. Thank you so much, Brian, John, and Leo!