Maria Damon, A Photowalk Slideshow
Covid-Durational Journey to Green-Wood Cemetery
When the COVID lockdown struck I was a gym rat, aiming to work off 1,000 calories per workout. What to do when the Prospect Park Y closed its doors? I resumed my pre-gym urban rambles, but instead of favoring the densely populated Flatbush Avenue as I had previously, I turned to Green-Wood Cemetery just as spring was emerging. It turned out to be a cornucopia of sensory and philosophical pleasures. Those found convergence in the sensate flowering, lumpy, Wüllendorfian trees; the insensate but eloquent monuments and headstones that communicated through their texts and their variegated textures; and the invisible but undeniable presence of the dead, whose presence became increasingly visible as the pandemic wore on. In the duration, my friend Paula Rabinowitz’s husband David Bernstein contracted the virus and died. At David’s burial (also in Green-Wood), the gravedigger told us that his responsibilities had gone from two to three digs a day to between twenty and thirty a day.
—Maria Damon
“Crematorium Grays” (video taken by Maria Damon in Brooklyn, NY, June 2020).