Book Review: Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery by Eugene Richards

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Book Review: Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery by Eugene Richards

March 12th, 2025 by Cary Benbow

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

Powerful and meaningful work can come from many places. Memories, dreams, fears, love, loss are all strings to pluck in the creative process. When an artist strikes the right chord, the interplay of multiple emotions can create a powerful, resonant third emotion. Melancholy comes to mind as a good example, but that term feels too overused, or worse, cliché.

Remembrance Garden struck a brand new chord for me when I viewed it. Right off the bat, Eugene Richards writes, “Hands shaking, temperature 103. The days were not much different than the nights, then the fever lifted. I was still having difficulty breathing, but needed to move, get out of the house, go to where there’d be more than a glimpse of the sky.” This sounds more like the beginning of the next great American novel, not a photo book about a cemetery.

Green-Wood Cemetery, a sprawling 487-acre National Historic Landmark in Brooklyn, serves as the subject of Eugene Richards’s Remembrance Garden. This work, born from Richards’s post-COVID recovery, spans three years and showcases the cemetery’s enduring beauty through all seasons. Richards’s photographs, taken during nearly 100 visits, capture both its sweeping landscapes and intricate details—from snow-covered headstones to moss-laden epitaphs. The inclusion of inscribed names, dates, and Richards’s own poignant reflections transforms the book into a deeply moving visual portrait and powerful tribute.

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

I spoke to Eugene Richards in the Spring of 2024, just as this book was coming out. We spoke briefly about the project, and how the cemetery acted as a respite for Eugene during the height of the pandemic in NYC. The photographs in Remembrance Garden were taken between April 2020 and September 2023, and by telling me about the project and his creative process, the strong connection Eugene has to Green-Wood became apparent. But I was not prepared for his personal narrative woven throughout the book when I received my copy. I eagerly went page by page through the book from front to back, drawn into the story which unfolded in front of me.

Amidst the carefully composed images and recorded details Gene found in the cemetery – epitaphs with personal details, poems carved into the stone grave markers, statues of animals and angels and saints – Gene writes personal memories of his father while his health is failing, his mother, and his first wife Dorothea. He starts recalling memories of ‘Dorrie’, the sight and sound of her, tender thoughts as well as the hunting memories of her illness and death which would repeat in his dreams and nightmares. His photographs of headstones include etched images or photographs of deceased people, couples, and children; and these photos noticeably appear in this section of the book. My eyes are wet with tears and by the time Gene returns the narrative to his father and visits with him at a nursing home, I’m overwhelmed by feelings of loss and my thoughts turn toward finding meaning in face of adversity.

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

The work of Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, felt like a nice parallel after experiencing Remembrance Garden. Collins invites readers into his poems with humor, then gently guides them toward deeper reflections on the ordinary, the preciousness of ordinary moments, the literary, and the poetic. Collins will juxtapose humor and melancholy, and rather than dwelling on grand pronouncements, he often finds meaning in the mundane details of life. Even death. Collins depicts the dead observing the living; “always looking down on us, they say,” engaged in everyday activities, such as “putting on our shoes or making a sandwich.” Collins can find humor in the face of death, but he never dismisses the underlying sadness. A great example of this is his poem “The Dead”. Read it the next chance you get.

Remembrance Garden strikes a poignant balance between the beauty of this particular cemetery, the genuine interest and curiosity Gene found in details like a tree swallowing a headstone, the inscribed details of lives lived, and his own feelings of profound loss and remembrance. This balance creates a nuanced and emotionally resonant portrayal and a calm acceptance of the natural order of things. Richards’s work helps us feel the mystery of being alive and helps us to remember, for a little while anyway, the resonance of our own lives.

From ‘Remembrance Garden’ © Eugene Richards

Remembrance Garden: A Portrait of Green-Wood Cemetery by Eugene Richards
Cloth Cover, 9.75 x 11.5 in.
152 pgs / 80 color photographs
Published by D.A.P. – Distributed Art Publishers
2024

Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. During the 1960s, Richards was a civil rights activist and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) volunteer. After receiving a BA in English from Northeastern University, his graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were supervised by photographer Minor White. Richards has published many volumes of photography on such diverse subject matters as poverty in America, women’s breast cancer, the aftermath of 9/11, emergency medicine and the lives of veterans of the Iraq war. He has been a member of Magnum Photos and of VII Photo Agency. To learn more, visit his website at https://eugenerichards.com

About Cary Benbow

Photographer, Writer, Publisher of Wobneb Magazine

View all posts by Cary Benbow →

Location: Online Type: Book Review

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