This is one of the most unexpected portfolios we have recovered: Graveyard flowers!
It was accompanied by these few sentences from photographer Peter B Leighton.
Gone Tomorrow
Flowers of all kinds are farmed and readily available where my wife and I once lived in the Andean Highlands of Ecuador. They liberally adorn the graves of the prosperous and poor alike. It is written in an Ecuadorian folk song, in fact, that when someone dies there, roses fall like tears from the sky. In this portfolio are twenty-five photographs of floral tributes placed in the portals of crypts in Ecuadorian cemeteries.
Here today, as they say, gone tomorrow.
The native Ecuadorian Quechua have their own way of dealing with such regrets, believing that in our hearts there is a secret garden, one whose soil is made of hope. Plant a flower there and nourish it, they tell us, and it will never die.
Peter B Leighton
www.pbleighton.com
