The Reposed

by William K. Greiner, Thomas Lynch, Steven Maklansky (Introduction)

The most obvious distinction of many south Louisiana graveyards is that hardly anyone is buried in them. In the delta, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, the land is flat, wet, and often below sea level, so coffins are placed in elevated tombs, vaults, and mausoleums. Truly cities of the dead, these cemeteries contain buildings of stone or brick, marble statues, wrought-iron fences, narrow passages, and hidden enclaves.
In sixty-two photographs, William K. Greiner captures the visual landscape of these ghostly neighborhoods. A colorful respite from the gray conventions of graveyard photography, his images leap off the page with brilliant hues. His pictures are not just about the graves, but also about the lives and values of the people who inhabit and visit them.
Where we expect to find solemn stones, Greiner points to a new lexicon of mourning. Plastic dolls, polyester ribbons, Styrofoam letters, and brilliant bouquets of plastic flowers adorn these graves and fill these photos. Holidays are marked with valentine hearts, Fourth of July displays, and Christmas decorations. Bingo boards and Harley-Davidson models stand as silent reminders of the daily lives the residents once lived.

Hardcover

First published October 1, 1999

Reviews

[Loren]

Most books of gravestone photographs focus on monuments to the wealthy. For the most part, William Greiner turns his camera on mementos left on the graves of the poor, documenting faded silk flowers in an empty wooden frame, blue fish gravel spread as a grave blanket, an amputee doll, a tatty white dove on a red wreath. The acute angles he chooses comment on the sur-reality of the offerings he finds. The short focal lengths used in many of the photos (especially the cover image of the Styrofoam heart full of blue silk carnations) give them an intense three-dimensionality that’s almost threatening. This book manages to be simultaneously cheerful and scary.

I met Greiner, a resident of New Orleans, by chance at a book signing one Halloween in New Orleans. When I asked which graveyard he recommended I should visit in order to see a true New Orleans observance of the Day of the Dead, he suggested Holt Cemetery. Hidden behind a community college and a police academy, this graveyard isn’t impressive like its swankier neighbors in Metairie. Originally founded as burial ground for the city’s indigent, interment in Holt has remained very inexpensive. In celebration of this, Holt is filled with handmade monuments, many of them exuberant in the face of grief.

While the photos in The Reposed are not identified by graveyard (only by city, unfortunately), I suspect that many of the photos labeled “New Orleans” were in fact taken at Holt. It’s clear that brave cheer struck a chord in Greiner. He discovered its kith in graveyards all across Louisiana, but I suspect, if we looked, we could find kin in any cemetery outside the dictatorship of the lawnmower.

Mortician and poet Thomas Lynch notes in his introduction that “the last word belongs not to death but to life.” The living have much to say in these heartfelt, if shabby, memorials. Analysis provides no answers, but inspires sympathy deep enough to bridge the gap between the viewer, the survivors, and the reposed.

I'm giving this 3 stars rather than 4 simply because I prefer sculpture to handmade monuments. It's a reflection of my preferences, rather than the quality of this book.

An earlier version of this review appeared in Morbid Curiosity #4.

[Diann Blakely]

"Blue Heart," the cover photo for William K. Greiner's monograph, announces both William Eggleston's influence and the pupil's departure from it. While Greiner's "snapshot" aesthetic clearly links him to Eggleston, and while he has created an entire book out of graveside tributes, the Louisianan emphasizes something different: the tender, loyal, and sometimes clumsy gestures that seek to assuage the pains of violence, mortality, and the resolute pastness of the past. And he does so with a gentle but unmuddied palette of blues, pinks, yellows, whites, and greens--colors in abundance in tropical New Orleans as well as in the suburbs and small towns that make up the surrounding bayou country.

Steven Maklansky's introduction to THE REPOSED implies the importance of exploring Greiner's work as a whole, yet "Blue Heart" still works as a synecdoche for the 62 photographs collected here: The cerulean floral marker is gaudy and in-your-face, but the photograph itself is neither obvious nor kitschy. Greiner isn't aiming for cheap satire. Instead, his work's detail asks us to take a second, slower look; in "Blue Heart," we discover the heartbreakingly delicate blue-gray plastic vine draped across the flowers and the sharp, marmoreal edges of aboveground tombs. In that moment the essence of Southern folk art is revealed: Its stylizations and eccentricities transcend both irony and sentimentality, locating between these poles the beauty of the sincerely homemade--in all its hues.







(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)