Project Ideas

Sometimes it’s difficult to come up with photographic projects, and, at other times, you aren’t doing too much of anything and they just pop into your head. This is an example of the latter.

For the last year or two, I have been on this 10,000 steps-a-day kick, which I have been following religiously, rain or shine. Sometimes I walk close to home and, at other times, I take a short ride and walk in a different neighborhood. I was recently taking a walk in Lawrenceville, PA, and wandered into a very large, historic cemetery. It’s a place that I have been to just a few times before and have even photographed once or twice.

But this time, as I was walking, I happen to notice that among the more typical headstones, those with a name and a ‘born on’ and ‘died on’ date, there were also some headstones that were extremely open-ended in a way that allowed a passer-by to almost construct a story. And it dawned upon me that this is much like a photograph in that a photo also has a limited ‘frame’ in which a story can be told; a limited space and time in which to grab and hold the viewer’s attention.

Wouldn’t that make an interesting project, headstones that seem to entice the viewer to imagine the story behind them? In order to remind myself of the project, I took a few cell phone shots since I didn’t have my ‘real’ camera with me. For example, there is a story here and it isn’t a good one.

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