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.
Photographer, writer and filmmaker Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1944. Following college and studies with photographer Minor White, Richards joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and was sent to Arkansas, where he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices. After publishing his first books¢"Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta and Dorchester Days¢"Richards began a 40-year career as a freelance editorial photographer and artist, producing a wide range of stories about the human condition in America and abroad. He has authored 17 photographic and textual books, including Exploding into Life, The Knife and Gun Club, War Is Personal, The Blue Room and, most recently, In This Brief Life. He directed and shot seven short films, including The Rain Will Follow and Thy Kingdom Come. Richards has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award and the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for Photographic Innovation.
Industry Reviews
Spend some time with this book and the very best thing will happen. You will dream yourself toward a community we will all join. Sooner or later. -- Scott Olsen * Frames *
The tension between humanity and nature is made palpable in Richards's photographs of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, which depict its gothic somberness in sweeping vistas and earthy close-ups of encroaching moss, ants and trees. * The New York Times Book Review *
Through the artist's sensitive lens and meditations in Remembrance Garden, Green-Wood Cemetery becomes not just a communal space for death and grief, but also an eternal sanctuary for life and healing. -- Maya Pontone * Hyperallergic *
Mr. Richards subsumes personal grief into an unending epic. -- Dominic Green * The Wall Street Journal *
His photos reflect a private engagement...Richards identifies the rich tension between the natural and the man-made. -- Greta Rainbow * Brooklyn Rail *
Together the assembled photos in this book constitute a poignant tour of this lush domain where some 600,000 souls now rest and where the living can find solace among their quiet ranks. -- Albert Mobilio * Hyperallergic *
