You Be The Print Judge

Places of Great Love - Placerville, ID


I remember being a child and walking thru the cemetery at Mission San Louis Rey with my eyes closed just so I get thru it without panicking. I don't know if my parents knew they were leading a blind man by the hand but they were. Being a rather imaginative child I was terrified. When I was in college studying photography I combined two of my greatest interests  (after women) - photography and monument art. I had by that time developed a particular interest in old cemeteries. Which I find odd because I was particularly frightened of them when I was young. 

As a class assignment I did a series of images at Mountain View Cemetery in the hills above Berkeley/Oakland. I titled the series "A Fine and Private Place" after the wonderful book by Peter S. Beagle. I spent every day there for an entire week. One of the images from that series became my best selling piece of personal artwork.

Ever since then I have been working on a large collection of images that I have come to call "Places of Great Love". I sometimes add "and sadness", when it comes to images like this one. I as a parent cannot imagine what the parents of these twin daughters have gone thru. I think the care given to the graves and the bench can only give us a hint. Unfortunately I think the synonym involved in this image might draw attention away from the message I am trying to communicate. Should I change it electronically?

If any family members are viewing this image I can only offer my heartfelt condolences, and an apology for having you revisit a painful memory.

 

The cemetery at Placerville has some very excellent monuments and is a very peaceful place. Placerville's earliest  contemporary's have since become ghost towns. Based on the names on the markers, some of the founding families live on in the area.

These images were captured with my Minolta X-700 and Tamron 28-200. The exposure was f 8 @ 1/60 sec. with asa 200 Kirkland Signature film. (Yes, the stuff Costco used to sell). It was a partly cloudy day in April and the pine trees gave me a good canopy and background to work with. 


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Please note that this page is copyright © Eric David Rehn.