Eugene Richards: Remembrance Garden

An exquisitely somber portrait of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery across the seasons

In March 2020, after suffering from a severe bout of Covid, Eugene Richards sought out a safe place to walk and recuperate, and became entranced with Brooklyn’s much-loved Green-Wood Cemetery. Founded in 1837 and proclaimed a National Historic Landmark in 2006, the 487-acre burial ground and arboretum is the final resting place of more than 550,000 people. Over the subsequent years, Richards made nearly 100 visits to Green-Wood, photographing both poetical details and grand vistas in rich color, across the seasons and in all weather, creating lyrical images of snowbound headstones, grand mausoleums, intimate epitaphs, the encroachments of moss on stone and the wear of time on all things. The photographs in Remembrance Garden were taken between April 2020 and September 2023. Richards intersperses his images with names and dates inscribed on grave markers and deeply personal memories, creating a grand and moving portrait of the legendary cemetery.
Photographer, writer and filmmaker Eugene Richards was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1944. Following college and studies with photographer Minor White, Richards joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and was sent to Arkansas, where he helped found a social service organization and a community newspaper, Many Voices. After publishing his first books—Few Comforts or Surprises: The Arkansas Delta and Dorchester Days—Richards began a 40-year career as a freelance editorial photographer and artist, producing a wide range of stories about the human condition in America and abroad. He has authored 17 photographic and textual books, including Exploding into Life, The Knife and Gun Club, War Is Personal, The Blue Room and, most recently, In This Brief Life. He directed and shot seven short films, including The Rain Will Follow and Thy Kingdom Come. Richards has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Journalism Award and the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award for Photographic Innovation.