Image City Photography Gallery will be showing some of my work this month. The opening is Friday night Oct 6, from 5-8 PM.
Halloween, brought to the US by the Irish in 1845, traces its roots to the Celtic holiday of Samhain when people would dress in scary costumes to ward off ghosts at the harvest celebration. This holiday was combined with the Catholic celebration of honoring the dead. At the same time. the Day of the Dead, or all Souls day, was celebrated in many cultures the following day. As the end of October has become associated with skeletons, witches, and death, the photographs I chose for this exhibit feature headstones from the 1700s as beliefs about death evolved from a final, frightening event to beliefs in the reward of an afterlife.
Symbols used during this time represented death, the passage of time, heaven and hell. The central image above is from Charleston, SC. The Susana Jayne headstone from Marblehead, MA has a carvedimage of skeleton, snake (eternity), sun and moon, bats and angels. I’ve combined these in a mandala to show the popular waysused to warn people to live carefully.
These two headstones from Hadley and Concord, MA are later portrait stones that carry out the earlier messages, while giving hope for the future, as people began to believe that the afterlife could be brighter.,
These images are also in my book, Cemetery Reflections, on sale at the gallery during the exhibit.