Showing posts with label cemetery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cemetery. Show all posts

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Resting in Peace, Wintergreen Cemetery, Port Gibson, Mississippi (B&W film)

Wintergreen Cemetery of Port Gibson, Mississippi, resembles a secret garden, a place that time forgot, with giant cedar trees, lichen-encrusted wrought-iron fences, and gravestones with dates from the 19th century. According to the National Park Service, Wintergreen Cemetery was established in 1807 and is the final resting place for Confederate soldiers killed in the Battle of Port Gibson.
There are so many fascinating stones and family plots, but I could only make a quick selection. The light was soft with minor drizzle - perfect for Ilford Delta 100 black and white film.
Giant trees have grown here for decades. This one has been gone a long time, but many other trees were damaged or toppled by a tornado on Nov. 1, 2018. A lady from the cemetery management company told me they were waiting to bring in heavy-duty tree removal machinery to lift massive limbs. Stones were knocked down and need to be restored.
Many of the family plots are surrounded by beautiful wrought-iron fences cast in the shape of tree limbs or vines. This type of metalwork may have been a major industry in the 1800s.
The historic Jewish cemetery is a few blocks away. It is maintained by the same company that operates Wintergreen. A Catholic cemetery is nearby, but I was running out of daylight and did not explore.

These photographs are part of a test of my new 1957-vintage Voigtländer Vito BL camera with its wonderful 50mm f/3.5 Color-Skopar lens. I used a tripod for all frames with exposures in the range of ¼ or ½ sec. at an aperture of about ƒ/8.0. Some of the Vito cameras had a simpler shutter without the slow speeds, but this one has the full modern geometric progression of speeds (1 sec. to 1/300).

Click the link for more photographs of Port Gibson with the Vito BL.

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

Tragic Memories: the Jewish Cemetery of Łódź, Poland

Cmentarz Żydowski is north of downtown Łódź, near where the Jewish Ghetto was located in World War II. The cemetery has a long history. As summarized in the Jewish Łódź Cemetery web page:
The Cemetery at the Bracka Street in Lodz was established in 1892. About 160 000 people are buried there. Today the Cemetery has an area of 39,6 hectare. In more than 100 years of the history of the Cemetery many meritorious for our city and its history people like known rabbis, fabricants, physicians, politicians, social activists etc were buried at this Cemetery. Their tombstones often show high class of stone and metal craftworks. 
Also here are buried victims of one of the most tragic events in the history of the mankind - Holocaust.  On the part of the Cemetery called “Ghetto Field” some 43 000 victims from the Ghetto Lodz, who died from hunger and consumption, are buried there. On their graves seldom we can see a matzeva. To keep the memory about them, the Foundation cleaned this area in the years 2004 - 2009.  In spite of other works on the Cemetery, Ghetto Field was the most important and crucial to restore so, that the few still living descendants of the persons buried there, could put the matzeva on the graves of their love ones, and the Ghetto Field would receive the character of the military cemetery, as it in fact is.
The entrance on Bracka Street is a bit hard to find, but a GPS will direct you there. We overlapped with a holocaust remembrance event, during which two busloads to visitors rolled up soon after we arrived. A sign said, "No Photography," but the bus visitors were all using digital cameras and video equipment.
The cemetery was largely undamaged in World War II, which is unusual in Poland. And during the Communist era, it was mostly neglected. So the site today has largely returned to forest. Huge trees draped with vines cover much of the site, making it resemble the fanciful paintings of ruined classical temples being overcome by nature (known as capriccio), which were popular in the 1800s.
Many of the monuments are still upright, but thousands have fallen, the victims of tree roots or collapsing coffins beneath. Some stones have been cleaned by relatives, but many more are lichen- and mold-encrusted. But the artistic quality of the stone carving still shines through.
The cemetery goes on and on. You could spend hours exploring. In some area, volunteers have cleared underbrush within the last few years, but other areas are thickets of brush and tree saplings.

Do visit and spend some time contemplating one of the profound tragedies of the 20th century, the Holocaust.

The square photographs were taken with Kodak Tri-X 400 black and white film in a Rolleiflex 3.5E twin lens reflex camera with a 75mm f/3.5 Schneider Xenotar lens. Film development: Kodak HC-110 dilution "B", 4:45 at 68° F. The exposure range from the dark undergrowth to the sunny sky was at the limit of the Tri-X to record, and I had to modify the tone curve when I scanned the negatives with a Minolta ScanMulti medium format film scanner. I cleaned spots and lint with Pixelmator software on a Mac Mini computer.

Update March 2017:  During World War II, photographer Henryk Ross took photographers in and around the Jewish Ghetto at great risk to his life. He buried the negatives in the ground in 1944 to try to preserve them. A Washington Post article describes an exhibit of Ross's photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

On the loose in Arusha, Tanzania

So, you have arrived at Kilimanjaro International Airport before embarking on a climb of Kilimanjaro or a safari to one of the game parks. You are tired, jet-lagged, and grubby. Other than a sleep, what should you do? Explore Arusha, what else?
Arusha is a bustling commercial city in north central Tanzania. It is not a tourist destination in itself, but is certainly worth a day or two of exploring. The central market in any city is worth a visit. This one was a bit smaller then I expected, and seemed quiet, but possibly my friends and I arrived too late in the day for the main action. The produce looks good!

Some big beefy ladies haunt the market district.
The market is next to the bus station, which is really active. There is no train service to Arusha now, but by bus you can go to Kenya or Uganda, and possibly further. That might be an interesting adventure.
Heading into town in the direction of the Clock Tower, the streets are commercial and lined with shops, small manufacturers, banks, mobile phone stores, and scooter/car repair shops. From what I can tell, everyone is busy, doing something, or plying some trade. Many of the stores run generators because while I was there, the mains electricity went off mid-morning and stayed off until early evening. Often the merchants sat on the sidewalk next to their generator. Yum, exhaust fumes.
A surprising number of merchants downtown were Indians (or Pakistanis?). We heard that many are descendants of Indian troops who were sent to Tanganyika in the early-20th century. When Britain gave up its colony, the former troopers stayed behind (or were left behind). Is this story true? In neighboring Uganda, the business class during the mid-20th century was dominated by Indians. Dictator Idi Amin (the "Butcher of Uganda") expelled the Indian traders, bankers, and merchants, and Uganda's economy virtually collapsed. (This sounds like the folly of Ferdinand and Isabella in expelling the Jews from Spain in the late-1400s - stupidity cloaked in religion.)
We came across a building with post office boxes, not a post office, just hundreds of boxes.
Near the bus station is a large and lonely cemetery. In the colonial era, it may have been the European cemetery. Sadly, it is neglected now.
On a clear day, Mount Meru looms over the city. Meru is a stratovolcano with peak elevation of 4,562.13 metres (14,968 ft). Our guide said there are climbing routes but it is not a common tourist destination.
We looked for English cultural remains, but I was surprised how few English buildings were left. This long colonnaded building was in the grounds of the Mount Meru Regional Hospital. Rangoon (see my Burma blog posts) has a much richer colonial architectural legacy.

This is the fourth of a series of Tanzania articles and has covered a short tour of Arusha. Should your travels take you there, do walk or take motorbikes round town.

Photographs taken with a Panasonic Lumix G3 digital camera with Panasonic 12-32mm lens. I  opened the raw files with Adobe Camera Raw 7.4 and processed most of the frames with DxO FilmPack 5 using the Kodachrome 25 emulation. I think it does not quite look like Kodachrome, but have no direct comparison available.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Monuments of the Past: Cavalry Cemetery, Galveston, Texas

Dear readers, some of you may remember that I wrote about Galveston's Old City Cemetery in 2014. In the early 1980s, I took some Kodachrome slides of mausoleums in a Galveston cemetery but did not record the location correctly. A friend in Galveston did some detective work and found that I had photographed the Calvary Cemetery. It is located on the Island between 61st and 65th Streets.
Here is the mausoleum in 1984 and 2014, after cleaning and, possibly, new plaster.
The older part of the cemetery, near 61st street, has a number of unusual tombs and mausoleums from the late-1800s or early 20th century. I do not know if victims of the 1900 hurricane are buried here.
Calvary Cemetery is a peaceful and interesting place to visit. But there is not as much statuary as in the Old City Cemetery.

2014 photographs taken with a Nexus 4 phone with files reprocessed with PhotoNinja software to reduce noise. The 1984 photograph is a Kodachrome slide taken with a Leica M3 camera and 50mm f/2.8 Elmar lens.

Friday, April 4, 2014

Resting in Peace: Old City Cemetery, Galveston, Texas

This is the third post on our tour of historic cemeteries around the world. Galveston's Old City Cemetery is right off Broadway Avenue, on your right soon after you enter the city after leaving the causeway from the mainland (I-45).
The cemetery is a flat rectangle with a mixture of ornate early 20th century tombs, some mausoleums, and some plain new stones. It is a merger of 7 historical cemeteries dating back over 170 years. A few web pages claim some of the interred are victims of the great 1900 Galveston Hurricane, but most of the dates I saw were later than that.
Some of the mausoleums have interesting architectural features; some are relatively unadorned.
There is some statuary, but not as much as I expected.
The adjoining streets are some of the oldest in the City, with a mixture of old cottages in varying states of repair.  The neighborhood around the Old City Cemetery looks safe enough, and there are even night-time ghost walks.
There are at least two other cemeteries in Galveston. The Calvary Cemetery off 61st street has a couple of tall mausoleums with  unusual domes. They are the most substantial structures at Calvary. Since I took this photograph in 1984, the unit in the foreground has been cleaned and is now white. The inscription above the door says, "Oppermann Family Vault 1884."
Lakeview Cemetery is not as interesting. Most of the monuments are modern.

Decades ago, Galveston was a bit rough, but it looks much better now.  Significant cleaning and restoring has been done (and is ongoing) after the flooding caused by Hurricane Ike on September 13, 2008. Many of the historic cottages have been repainted and re-landscaped. If you have not been here in years, come for another visit.
This is a radar image of Hurricane Ike at landfall: HGX Radar, Base Reflectivity, 1:07am CDT (from the National Weather Service, Houston/Galveston, via the Wikimedia Commons). This was just a few miles north of Hurricane Alicia's landfall on August 18, 1983. I lived in Houston at the time, and the eye of Alicia went right over our house.

I took the 2014 photographs with a Fuji X-E1 digital camera and processed the RAW files with PhotoNinja software. The 1984 color photograph is a scan of a 35 mm Kodachrome 25 slide, taken with a Leica M3 camera mounting a 50mm f/2.8 Elmar lens (the post-war version of the Elmar with Lanthanum glass). Thank you to Ms. Carol Wood, Archivist at the Rosenberg Library, for helping me identify the Calvary Cemetery.

For another historic cemetery, click the link for the First Cemetery in Athens, Greece.