The older the better. Cemetery Entrance gates. Headstones-single or paired. View attachment Williams Chapel Cemetery 001-cropped.jpg
One of the oldest and best cemeteries in the Bay Area is above the town of Sonoma, California. This is an old sample from there.
Damn, now I’m going to have to find a country cemetery in the middle of nowhere that I stumbled on a few years back. Headstones dating from the 1770’s.
I have found that older tombstones often have more character. Walking through a small graveyard about 40 yrs ago with my daughter, but without camera, I found a tombstone from early %1800s that read like a novel. I don’t remember the names, so I am just using made up names: Here lies the body of Mary Smith, beloved wife of John Smith, murdered by the incompetent physician Dr. Frederick Jones. I have been back to that cemetery several times with my camera but never found it again.
I believe enough in photographers that a good one can photograph a new one and figure out a way to give it whatever character it may *seem to* inherently lack. (It’s less likely that it lacks character and more likely that its individual character hasn’t been accessed or discovered by the one encountering it or that the character being looked for is what’s expected instead of something new or surprising.) Photographing a tombstone with cute writing on it would be one thing. Making a photo with character is quite another.
)"Photographing a tombstone with cute writing on it would be one thing. Making a photo with character is quite another." Sam Indeed. Show us...., walk the walk, not the talk.
