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Mount Zion: Sepulchral Portraits
Mount Zion, built in 1893, is an Orthodox
Jewish cemetery located in Queens, New York,
sandwiched between a New York City Sanitation
plant and the Long Island Expressway. “Sepulchral
portraits” refer to miniature photographs once
placed on many of Mount Zion’s tombstones, a
custom brought over by Jewish immigrants from
Eastern Europe. These images — often heavily
retouched — were burned into porcelain or metal
tablets, then glazed. The process was, at the time,
advertised as permanent; but the ravages of the
elements, pollution, and vandals have transformed
these portraits into something else altogether.
What remains of them — and what has become of
them — is what John Yang set about to portray in
his own series of photographs, taken between
1994 and 1998. The result is a meditation on
memory, mortality, the urban landscape, and the
photographic process itself. "Mount Zion:
Sepulchral Portraits" is a book that exists at the
intersection of portraiture, Judaica, New York City
studies, graveyard art, and documentary
photography.
Published and distributed by D.A.P.
Hardcover, 112 pages, 7" x 10", $35.00
ISBN 1-891024-23-x
Order this book directly from this site:
"The book itself is an orchestrated beauty. What
could have been presented as simple black and
white reproductions have been wisely preserved in
a mute but saturated color, informed with ambers,
periwinkle blues and faint purples that act on an
almost unconscious eye. As the portraits are also
photographs of photographs, Mount Zion acts as
meditation on photography itself, the role we
ascribe to it, the beauty it is capable of, and the
failings that dress this art form in all its guilty
allure. This book is not morbid or gratuitous, it is,
rather, a caring depiction of what seems to be life's
essential drive to ravage, as well as of the beauty
that remains in its ruins and debris. And we are
confronted with the fact that our efforts against this
ravage are ultimately what make us human and
beautiful. Simply put, this book is human and
beautiful." — Marc Lowenthal, "Raintaxi"
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Over the Door: The Ornamental
Stonework of New York
From 1989 through 1993, photographer John
Yang undertook an intensive photographic study of
the ornamental sandstone reliefs on New York City
brownstones and tenements of the late 19th
century. The result is "Over the Door," a meticulously
prepared and exquisitely produced volume of urban
portraiture — Yang’s photographs capture the
various moods of the many sculptured
personalities that stand watch over the doorways,
spandrels, and arches of Manhattan. The
photographs are also a study of the effects of time
on these carvings, which, regrettably, are rapidly
deteriorating from acid rain as well as the
happenstance of real estate development —
demolition and renovation each take their toll on the
carvings.
Yang’s methodical study of these relief carvings —
he covered every block of Manhattan, from the
Lower East Side to Harlem, several times in his
search for subjects — has yielded a valuable book
for the sake of its subject alone; but like Atget,
Walker Evans, and other great “documentary”
photographers, Yang chose his specific subjects
primarily for their value to him as material for his art.
This dialogue between historical documentation
and the artist’s personal vision makes "Over the
Door" a landmark book of photography, as well as
a photographic book of landmarks. It also brings to
the fore the artwork of another era — faces peering
down from the many layers of the modern urban
streetscape.
Published by Princeton Architectural Press
Hardcover, 192 pages, 5" x 7", $19.95
ISBN 1568980574
"The photographs in 'Over the Door' are indisputably
John Yang’s — closely observed, contemplative,
eloquent, and outside of time and space. Here,
carved in an indeterminate past, are expressions of
New York’s most anachronistic yearnings, and
Yang’s detailed attention renders them at once
achingly familiar and exceedingly strange."
— Andy Grundberg, Director, Ansel Adams Center
for Photography
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