{"id":3126,"date":"2015-08-03T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2015-08-03T16:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=3126"},"modified":"2015-08-03T11:43:43","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T15:43:43","slug":"antrim-centor-cemetery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=3126","title":{"rendered":"Antrim Centor Cemetery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I finished reading a wonderful book, Seeking Parmentor; A Memoir of Place<\/a> by Charles Butterfield. \u00a0Highly recommended!<\/p>\n

In this book Charles mentions that Amos Parmentor is buried in the Antrim Centor* cemetery. This inspired me to make a visit to the cemetery and the nearby Lily Pond which features prominently in the book.<\/p>\n

The Parmentor grave sites were in a deeply shaded part of the burying ground and thus I did not make any photographs of them. I did, however, find and photograph a number of other nineteenth century headstones in”interesting” light.<\/p>\n

The first two photographs below speak to a couple of interesting “philosophical” issues in photography.<\/p>\n

The first of these is the idea that photography is, in one critical way, fundamentally different from other art forms. In making a photograph, an artist must consciously decide what to exclude (either by the original framing of a scene in the viewfinder or by cropping later) from his or her artwork. In making all other artwork, the artist must decide what to include in their artwork.<\/p>\n

The second issue is that of “truth”. It is often suggested that somehow a photograph shows a “true story”. \u00a0Of course, in this age of “photoshopping”, this idea has begun to crumble<\/del>\u00a0lies in a heap of shards.<\/p>\n

However, if you think about the first issue, i.e. that photographers must consciously decide what to include in the frame (and therefore also what to exclude), one realizes that the truth in a photograph is highly subjective and it has always been that way.<\/p>\n

The first photograph below shows a pair of gravestones, that of Artamus Brown (who died in 1875 at the age of 73 ys, 4 ms) and Rhoda, his wife (who died in 1813 at the age of 33; one could make an educated guess that childbirth might have been involved in her demise). This photo suggests a tidy story.<\/p>\n

However, if one takes a step back and includes one more, adjacent gravestone, that of Almira, [also] wife of Artamus Brown (who died in 1897 at the age of 81 ys, 4 ms), one sees a more complete (“truer”?) story of Artamus’ life.<\/p>\n

I am fascinated by an implied story in the second photograph. Notice how Almira’s headstone is not aligned with the other two; it is set back from the other pair. Furthermore the gap between Artamus’ and Almira’s stones is larger than that between\u00a0Artamus’ and Rhoda’s. What story does\u00a0this spacing of gravestones\u00a0tell? Am I “reading” too much in to this story? I doubt that we’ll ever know!<\/p>\n

[scrollGallery id=386 autoscroll = false width = 600 height = 600\u00a0useCaptions = true]<\/p>\n

* This is the nineteenth century spelling.<\/p>\n

\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday, I finished reading a wonderful book, Seeking Parmentor; A Memoir of Place by Charles Butterfield. \u00a0Highly recommended! In this book Charles mentions that Amos Parmentor is buried in the Antrim Centor* cemetery. This inspired me to make a visit to the cemetery and the nearby Lily Pond which features prominently in the book. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[92],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-monadnock-region"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3126"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3135,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3126\/revisions\/3135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}