It is a safe assumption to claim death as a key fear for human beings. When I considered the heuristic phenomenon of courage, I thought about dying as perhaps the bravest thing I will ever do because it scares me the most. The title of this video is a quote from a poem by John Donne. He writes, "Death, be not proud." The poem aims to show defiance toward death and great courage when facing it. For Donne, and for many of those whose graves I photographed, this courage is rooted in faith. 

 

To capture the essence of this courage, I photographed scenes from Greenville's Springwood Cemetery. It is a historical cemetery for the area and many of the names on headstones and crypts will be familiar to local residents. Too, it has a large number of graves for Confederate soldiers from Greenville, a unique historical element. 

 

I wanted to capture the many varieties of remembrances but also the epitaphs left behind. What I discovered was a persuasive message of hope and memory. Though the departed are no longer with us in the flesh, they are remembered and loved, through these words etched in granite but more importantly in the hearts of those who loved them. The message is a consistent one: they are at peace. 

 

I had some foreknowledge of the cemetery and wanted to be sure to capture one of the infant graves, marked as such with a small lamb statue on top of the headstone.