January 2013
Artist’s Statement
The more I photographed in cemeteries, the more I felt the sculptures, that marked the graves of the deceased, were giving me a sense of the person buried there. Those feelings led me to do a series of intimate “portrait style” photographs of cemetery sculpture.
When I started the project I was shooting mostly 35 mm. I was given a DSLR as a present, and began using that when I started having difficulty affording film. I replaced the lens on my DSLR with that of a pinhole body cap in many of the photographs.
Biography
By way of New Jersey and California, Mark K. Brockway is a self-taught photographer residing in Natchez, Mississippi. He has always dabbled in photography, but it truly became a passion when he visited Mississippi for the first time 11 years ago. On that trip he was exposed to the photography of Euphus “Butch” Ruth, Bill Steber, and Birney Imes, who were doing lots of work in the small towns, cemeteries, and juke joints of the Mississippi Delta. Being exposed to their photography was, for him, a lightning bolt of sorts. It ignited something within him to pursue photography more seriously. He likes to think of his photographs in terms of old 78 records: they may have lots of flaws, skips and crackles, but hopefully you can still enjoy the music.
