And so, about this tomb of mine. . .
Another beautiful photo by Carol M. Highsmith: “Cities of the Dead Cemetery tombs, New Orleans, Louisiana,” 2007, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
This tomb is in the Masonic Cemetery in Mid-City.
“Necropolis de Colon, Havana, Cuba,” 2010, by Carol Highsmith, via the Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón [Christopher Columbus] was founded in 1876. The 140-acre cemetery is located in the Vedado neighbourhood of Havana, Cuba, and holds more than 500 family vaults, mausoleums, and chapels.
Carol M. Highsmith is a contemporary photographer who has specialized in documenting architecture and landscape — high and low — in all 50 American states. Her influences are Frances Benjamin Johnston and Dorothea Lange. You can read more about her life here.
Highsmith is donating her life’s work — more than 100,000 images — copyright-free to the Library of Congress. Many of her images are printed in the distinctive black and white style shown here.
A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space – a place not just set apart but reverberant – and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.
Paul and Henri at Cornusson, Parisot Commune, in the Pyrenees, France, ca. 1870, by Eugène Trutat, via the Bibliothèque de Toulouse Commons on flickr.
As from the house your mother seesYou playing round the garden trees,So you may see, if you will lookThrough the windows of this book,Another child, far, far away,And in another garden, play.But do not think you can at all,By knocking on the window, callThat child to hear you. He intentIs all on his play-business bent.He does not hear; he will not look,Nor yet be lured out of this book.For, long ago, the truth to say,He has grown up and gone away,And it is but a child of airThat lingers in the garden there.— Robert Louis Stevenson, “To Any Reader”
“Woman and girl standing in icy square, Washington, D.C.,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter, via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Uriah Hunt Painter, 1837-1900, took a number of snapshot photographs of his neighborhood around Franklin Square and of downtown Washington using the first Kodak cameras. Painter was a businessman and retired newspaper reporter.
“[The p]hoto shows a woman and a young girl posing mid-square with bundles. The two may be Painter’s wife, Melinda Avery Painter, and older daughter, Eleanor, returning from a marketing trip. Or perhaps Painter took their portrait because the girl is holding another Kodak – exemplifying the growing corps of amateur photographers who took advantage of Eastman’s simple box camera.”
— from the LoC online catalog
Above: “Market scene, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1889, by Uriah Hunt Painter. I don’t know which square is pictured in these photos.
Above: “Franklin Square, Washington, D.C., snow view,” 1989, by Uriah Hunt Painter.
Pope’s famous lines, in his “Epistle to the Earl of Burlington,” on ‘the genius of the place,’ . . . surely evoke a conception of The Garden as an epiphany. For Pope, ‘the genius of the place’ does not refer, as it does for many later writers, to the ambiance or natural setting of a garden: rather, it is that which ‘Now breaks, or now directs, the intending lines’ and ‘Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.’ Palpable, here is a sense of The Garden as both a response to and an exemplification of something beyond the control and invention of human beings.
— David E. Cooper, from A Philosophy of Gardens
(Thanks to View from Federal Twist.)
The view at night, under snow, of the Post Office Building, Washington, D.C., 1911. Via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, photographer unknown.
Merry Christmas!
enclos*ure 