Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah, GA
Date1941
Mediumgelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 inches (19.1 × 24.1 cm)
Credit LineMuseum purchase with funds provided by the Gari Melchers Collectors' Society.
Object number2018.5
Copyright© 1981 Center for Creative Photography, Arizona Board of Regents.
The images and text contained on this page are owned by Telfair Museums or used by the Museum with permission from the owners. Unauthorized reproduction, transmission or display of these materials is prohibited with the exception of items deemed “fair use” as defined by U.S. and international copyright laws.Label TextIn Leaves of Grass, published in various versions between 1855 and 1892, poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892) sought to create an American epic. Half a century after Whitman’s death, the Limited Editions Club of New York commissioned renowned photographer Edward Weston to create a series of images of “real American faces” and “places” to accompany a high-end portfolio edition of the book. Weston spent much of 1941 traveling the United States in his own epic photographic journey. He said that he was not out to merely “illustrate” Whitman and hoped the project would result in the best work of his life. Weston took some 700 images for the project, 49 of which were printed in the two-volume edition published in 1942. Although Weston was unhappy with the book’s design, the project yielded some of the photographer’s most poetic images, including a faded Louisiana plantation house, an elderly Texas couple looking not unlike Grant Wood’s American Gothic characters, and a brooding view of the New Mexico landscape.
In Weston’s image of Bonaventure, an iron fence separates the viewer from the realm of the dead, a grouping of monuments clustered under an arch of sun-illuminated Spanish moss and curving oak branches. The Telfair family tomb appears at the far left edge of Weston’s composition.Photographed inBonaventure Cemetery, 330 Bonaventure Road, Thunderbolt, Georgia, United States of America
