Saturday

The Cemetery Project - an introduction



Pilarcitos Catholic Cemetery, Half Moon Bay


Many times I drove down Highway One when visiting my daughter in Santa Cruz. A road winding along the cliffs where ever changing waters of the Pacific carved her caresses into the land with pendulum regularity. There, often I chose to explore a small side road branching off into the unknown, sometimes only to get temporarily lost with no urgency to find my way back.


On one of those trips, a side road took me along fields that were freshly turned over and grass hills no longer green, where cattle grazed before I saw a few houses appearing like dots in the distant. It was a small cluster of structures, a community with no more than two streets. I turned off from the main artery that still lead into the distance ahead, to travel this this narrower road cutting through the settlement with unevenness and in short distance came to a church and a small stone bridge that not only crossed a creek but also marked the end of town.



Monterey Cemetery, Oakland


Continuing onward with the inquisitiveness of an explorers passion, I soon came to the end of the rural road but for a wide foot path traversing towards a broken down wooden gate, where beyond lay buried the towns history.


The cemeteries appearance was unremarkable. It was overgrown, with grave markers tumbling from their once erected presence by natured shifting topography or a youths drunken adventure of stupidity.


It was not the first, nor will it be the last cemetery I explore. But it is one of twelve I have covered these last fifteen months and documented with my iPhone 4S.



St Anthony Cemetery, Pescadero


Earlier this year I noticed the work of other mobile artists photographing cemeteries with the same passion that I felt when spending endless hours on end, on the grounds of memories antiquity. I wrote these artists and inquired if they would like to partake in a collaborative project based on the subject of cemeteries. 


Now six months later, The Cemetery Project — a collaborative series finally comes to fruition and over the next several months, the art work of the talented mobile artists and their stories will appear here at The iPhone Arts website. 



Hope Cemetery, Pescadero





Hope Cemetery, Pescadero





St Anthony Cemetery, Pescadero





Old Pioneer Cemetery, St Helena





Petaluma Calvary Cemetery, Petaluma



All photographs taken with an iPhone 4S by
©2014 Egmont van Dyck - All Rights Reserved









3 comments:

Carlos said...

great article and pix. Thanks for sharing.

~*~Patty S said...

such an interesting piece and your photos are very powerful and moving...we are drawn to cemeteries finding them peaceful and full of stories and oddly enough 'life'...our recent visit to Rock Cemetery in Nottingham England was a walk back to Victorian times

Caron Michelle said...

Fabulous subject - I have been fascinated with cemetries since a kid and love browsing through the headstones - enjoyed reading this article.

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