A review just in from Ellen Graham, Indie Reader, focuses on the photographic element of my book:.
“Jane Hopkins’ CEMETERY REFLECTIONS is a sensitive photographic monograph about death, loss and mourning as manifest in cemetery images that allow readers to connect with the strange comfort such quiet spaces provide. Hopkins reflects about her experience making the photos for this book, “I have come to appreciate cemeteries as sanctuaries where people may feel close to those who are gone and experience their deep feelings of grief.” Indeed, CEMETERY REFLECTIONS is about the human experience of death, grief and solace more than it is a book of photography as a particular art form. In choosing to orient her work this way, Hopkins is consistent with her sensitivity toward and orientation around the process of loss.
Hopkins’ images overall are craftsman-like, well-lit, well-composed and well-presented on the page. She has created sections of photos and juxtapositions between photos that create resonance through their similarities. Hopkins’ approach here, with its overlapping image types — close-ups of headstones; rows of graves; the soft shapes of women, children and angels carved into stone now further softened by time — offers a less tightly edited but more meditative approach to her subject. As such, Hopkins work is broad rather than incisive.
Some of Hopkins’ photographs in CEMETERY REFLECTIONS provide especially strong visual poetry, revealing and emphasizing in their composition a distinctive solace manifest in cemeteries because of their often-bucolic surroundings. These resonant images tend to place the intentional, orderly geometry of gravestones small within frames dominated by the lush, living, intricate landscape of trees, branches and flowers. In one image of Church Hill Cemetery, a gravestone is dwarfed by the dynamic, spreading branches of an old tree, as if to serve as a reminder that death exists within a larger context of life. Hopkins also uses color well to create a different type of poetic echo — juxtaposing the monochrome simplicity of stone with the richer hues of living material. In another image, an inert gray relief depicting the organic form of a branching tree is brought to life by vivid yellow lichens growing on the stone. In images such as these, death just isn’t quite a match for life, which is simply comforting.
The imagery in Jane Hopkins’ CEMETERY REFLECTIONS, thoughtfully supplemented with text and quotations, is a gentle memento mori in book form made especially poignant by its release during the COVID-19 era.”
~Ellen Graham for IndieReader