Liminal Life (the art of graveyard photography)
Passing through the gates of a graveyard, you are invited to leave the noise and bustle of daily life behind; and it may take a while to feel your way into this new, liminal landscape.
At first you are aware of surface features only: the communal areas, green lawns and benches, the shrubs, trees, chapels, sculptures, and public memorials. But gradually, as the quietness seeps into you, your steps slow down, and your attention deepens. The closer you look, the more you see: tendrils curl over the tops of gravestones, creeping plants wind their way through carved inscriptions, bright green algae colonize grey granite walls.
Peering into creeper-covered sepulchres, cobwebbed vaults and cracked crypts, your edges soften, you breathe more easily, and your heart opens. Time and the elements work together in haphazard, co-incidental ways. Mold, mildew, yeast and fungus, merge their colours, etch, erode, corrode. There’s treasure to be found in ‘dead matter’.
Life unfolds here according to its own laws.The raw material is everywhere: mosses, lichens, peeling paint, random markings left by micro-organisms on stone and rock. It’s the seamlessness and complexity of these processes that wants to be photographed. Wandering the silent, winding pathways, sun warm on your back, birdsong filling the air, you become a more easeful self; a more spacious awareness. Open to chance, and to change, your lens searches out the design within the design. Nature is a conundrum. A stone is a stilled dynamic, reaching out towards the abstract. There is no plan now. The camera is simply an instrument through which an alchemical process is happening.
There’s nothing here remotely concerned with ‘death’. Death is only an idea now, a static thing. If there is any ‘death’ here, it is only the death of the idea that things have a separate, fixed identity. But there is nothing fixed here. Sunlight glints through the stained glass of a sepulchre window, splashing the crumbling paint work crimson and gold. Spider webs glisten.
A chord is struck; a string plucked.
Here! What actually is here?
Millions of cells, morphing and germinating. Prolific. Powerful. A sudden intensification of happiness. Immense good fortune.
And you? You are a fusion of elements; a blended aesthetic, a being-in-kinship with life. You are immersed in the continuum: the de-generating, re-generating, intimate landscape.
Your gaze falls where the sun points. This is what brings you to life.
Here, there is nothing but deep contentment, and palpable peace. Here you are timelessly alive, pleasure-pervaded, coalescing with delight. Take the plunge! Dive into the metamorphosis; become absorbed!
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Click here for information on my book: Liminal Life - graveyard photography and the art of interbeing. (which contains this essay, plus 38 images).
All images below: Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris
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