In a faraway place called Cemetery of San Fernando in Seville, Spain, I forayed into landscape photography. The landscape, however, was a dialectic, man-made, and existential space where the living wrap their arms around and dearly hold onto the dead. 

Lavish memorializations made of flowers and artifacts belied the sepulchral farewells echoed in the air and the stillness of the ground. Air and ground were betrayed by the living clinging to such words as ‘mother’ (madre), ‘brother’ (hermano),  ‘nephew’ (sobrino), and ‘love’ (amor). Those words and so many others represent a lack. At the cemetery, it was as though all the flowers, ornaments, and artifacts embodied that lack. Behind the veil of exuberance, there was loss of the ones who sacrificed themselves for someone else. In the meandering river of blood ties, sacrifice means purpose, meaning, and love.

As I viewed my own work, I was hit with a devastating revelation. Each flower, clothing, or relic of some kind on the gravesites represented what that person meant to someone else. That fact is all there was and now remains. We are assigned an identity– involuntarily, sometimes unbeknownst, at some point during our lives. We live up to an identity by fulfilling a lack that someone has and then we are ready to die. 

As I walked the eternally personified grounds; increasingly, several dichotomies became salient. The cemetery was a space that was somber but beautiful, restive but quiet, and trenchant but mute. 

Perhaps, may inner synthesis is informed by my unforgiving American southern roots. The history of ruin, decay, and violence in the Deep South is far too much for words and artifice to mask. As a result, my interpretation may sound plaintive.

With all that said, I acquiesce that, as the living complete the dead, the living complete the photographs herein.