Summer at Mt Hope Cemetery

The rolling hills, magnificent trees and melancholy artistry that make up Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY, combine to create an eerily beautiful setting, meant to house Rochester’s dead, at the same time creating a treasured park and museum to the living. The narrow roads of the cemetery wind around the shaded hills leading visitors to parcels of unique character and mood, making this an exciting place to explore. From towering obelisks that seem to pierce the canopy to headstones that hide under blades of short grass, the diversity of the stone monuments here is only trumped by the variety of classes, races and characters that fill the ground beneath. Mausoleums symbolizing power and wealth share hilltops with unmarked gravestones, and unrelated family plots seem to randomly intertwine. Here one can find organization everywhere, with proper rows of matching stones, and carefully labeled sections and maps. But the real treasures here are the solitary markers that lie off near the hillside or in the shadows in their own microcosms and surely have their own stories to tell.

A walk in this cemetery is barely fulfilling without a guidebook, or better yet an experienced tour conductor. Even common graves have stories to tell. Some beaten and broken by time and weather, tell the story of their time and nurture. Wives’ stones, snapped in half by unknown forces, have been lovingly rested upon their husband’s and the tragedy of a child’s death can be felt in the loving words engraved for him or her. An historian can easily discover hundreds of stories buried within the cemetery grounds; an artist can easily tell a thousand more.

The breathtaking geological landscape, the eclectic mix of monuments in various states of decay and repair – from the well-kept and pristine to the illegible and crumbled, and the tales they all have to tell – make Mt. Hope Cemetery one of New York State’s best locations for photography.