Figure 1 – Infant’s grave, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, MA. (c) DE Wolf 2018.

I have visited Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery many times over the last 30 years, always with camera in hand. But the place that I always return to is the little infant’s gravestone of Figure 1. I have found it so hard to express in image. It speaks eloquently of the tragedy of child or childbirth death, so common to the nineteenth century. But there is something else. The stone is worn with time, and that weathering creates a sense of embryonic form. It is not a fully formed life. It has been tragically cut short, despite the potential of all humanity.

I think that this amorphic character is what makes the grave so hard to photograph. The camera like the human eye tries disparately to focus, but all the lines and edges are fuzzy. But really it is through that blur we share the tragedy of so long ago.

Canon T2i with EF70-200mm f/4L USM lens at 70 mm, ISO 200, Aperture Priority AE mode, 1/50th sec at f/7.1 with -1 exposure compensation.