Since its founding in 1869, Lake View Cemetery has been tagged with many descriptive titles: silent suburb, outdoor museum, green island, arboretum, bird sanctuary, sculpture gallery, public garden and Cleveland’s best address. The 285 acres spread across three municipalities is all that and more, a place established from the start to serve both the living and the dead.
The cemetery began as an idea, the brainchild of prominent influential civic-minded men whose surnames have become permanent parts of Northeast Ohio history: Wade, Perkins, Payne, Sherman, Bingham, Stone, and Holden. They saw a need for an alternative to the overcrowded, often neglected, desecrated, and even abandoned urban burial places scattered around the city. Along with other community leaders they formed an association and took on the task of raising money to establish a more suitable, spacious, and permanent resting place and retreat for present and future generations.
There is no other book about the Lake View Cemetery like this one. I have embraced the essential elements that define it the sense of history and humanity, art and architecture, horticulture and topography. But I haven’t organized the material in the obvious ways. Instead I sought to put together a visual symphony in four parts: The Vision, The Place, The Heart, and The Journey. Each section, like a musical movement, has a theme, but also echoes and repeats elements from the others. Together they form something that is more than just a collection of chapters and ideas, and offer a deeply personal interpretation of my experience and the topics that interest me: creativity, craftsmanship, light, metaphor and abstraction, scale, geometry, color, space and time. Working in Lake View was a constant process of discovery that led me to new vistas, both of the landscape itself and my own inner world. This collection of images is a kind of meditation on how I see and the fundamental questions that preoccupy me: who am I and what is my purpose?
I have tried to honor the planners, minds, and hands that created the gravestones and monuments, the feelings of the families that commissioned them, as well as the labors of all who have contributed to this marvelous arboretum and sanctuary. At a certain point I had to force myself to stop making photographs in and around Lake View so that this book could be produced and published. But after more than a decade spent wandering these acres with my camera I am not done and I don’t think I ever will be. It has become clear to me that this place devoted to the end of life is full of possibilities and new discoveries.
BOOK
The Lake View Cemetery: Photographs From Cleveland’s Historic Landmark.
Photographs by Barney Taxel
Text by Laura Taxel
Foreward by Tom E. Hinson
The University of Akron Press
2014
248 pages
http://www.lakeviewcemeterybook.com
http://www.taxelimagegroup.com
