Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries - Hardcover

David Robinson lives in San Francisco.

Photographer Robinson proves self-effacing in this engrossing little photo-essay. His envisioning of his subjects definitely takes second place to those subjects themselves. They are the figures of grieving women with which wealthy western European bourgeois families decorated the graves of their men. The figures are never of old or even middle-aged women; they are never portraits of family members. Rather, they are ideals, generally voluptuous and posed to evoke eroticism as well as mourning, and intended, Robinson says in an excellent afterword, to console by indicating the perfection of the life after death in which nineteenth-century Western culture maintained belief even as secularization banished church proprietorship of cemeteries, thereby allowing such fleshly monuments. Fascinating. Ray Olson