These were taken on the same day that I went to explore Greenwood Cemetery back in 2004. These were taken in both Greenwood and Holt Cemetery.
I had never heard of Holt Cemetery until I came across it that day. From the Save Our Cemeteries website:
Originally a cemetery for the city’s indigent population, Holt Cemetery passed through several rounds of ownership before being established by Dr. Joseph Holt, a city board of health official, in 1879.
Holt is a potters field cemetery in New Orleans, and nearly all of the gravesites are below ground. The sites are taken care of by the families of the deceased, and there are a lot of homemade gravestones or memorials. Even though the city has done a lot of repairs and upgrades over the years, the cemetery still shows significant neglect, with some graves showing human remains.
It’s such a drastic change from the well-manicured above-ground tombs of Greenwood.
Back in early September, I decided to get up super-early one Saturday morning and head to the Madisonville boat launch to catch pictures of the sunrise. I brought my Konstruktor loaded with Lomo 400 and managed to get some really beautiful shots of the sky.
I am always surprised how nice the shots I get from the Konstruktor are. Yes, they’re slightly soft and fuzzy, but I like the dreamy feel it gives. Not bad for a plastic camera I built myself.
These are probably some of the oldest film scans on my laptop, back from when I was working at Lakeside Camera. During the majority of my time in the lab, I either spot checked the photos or worked the photo printers – one was an Agfa and another a Fuji printer that I had used at Eckerd Express Photo. I was working the Fuji one day when I got a roll from another employee and was surprised to see the colors on the screen – I’d originally thought we messed up the development, or the monitor had gone funky, or something like that. I asked them about it and that’s when I learned about cross-processing. I instantly fell in love. Those color shifts were just so cool, like something off of a 1990s band album cover photo shoot.
See, as much as I loved processing photos and seeing other pictures, I was always hesitant to do anything more than the souvenir snaps of friends and such. Seeing that sparked my creativity and curiosity about what I could do. That afternoon before I left, I bought some rolls in the store and decided to do something with them on my next day off.
On that day, I loaded up my camera bags with the Minolta and some B&W and slide film, and headed over to Greenwood Cemetery. It was a summer weekday morning, so there weren’t many people out and about. I stopped in the main office to see if it was okay for me to walk around and take pictures in the graveyard. They told me sure, as long as I stayed away from any services that were scheduled (of course!), and I parked my car somewhere in the middle of the graveyard and went walking.
I scanned them the next time I went to work and was totally shocked at how awesome these came out. Even today, I don’t want to edit them. These scans are exactly how that film came out, no retouching or anything. They’re still some of my favorite photos I’ve done to this day.
I ended up finishing up the rolls in City Park – that’s another post though.
