The Reposed Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

The most obvious distinction of many south Louisiana cemeteries 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. And, like any city, they are densely packed with bodies.

In sixty-two stunning 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 graves, but also about the lives and values of the people who inhabit and visit them. Most of his portraits are of humble and inconspicuous burial grounds. Located somewhere between town and country, they exist as geographic testimony to our Comprehension of the graveyard as the transitional space between heaven and earth. In these photographs, there is no great divide; streetlamps and telephone wires intrude into the heavens, supermarkets and mausoleums share parking lots, and religious and secular symbols vie for attention.

Not a soul appears in these images, but they are haunted none the less, by the skeletons of flowers, by chipped statuettes, by faded pictures, and by overgrown grass; by the tangible evidence of the passing visits of those who have come to bury or remember their clear departed; by passing clouds, and by the passage of time. In his striking memorials to these memorials, Grein er honors the colorful cast of characters, both alive and dead, whose telling traces he has found left behind.