Grave Images

San Luis Valley

Photographer and installation artist Kathy T. Hettinga documents a body of funerary folk art displayed in the cemeteries of the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado. Her photographs of unique grave markers made of wood, concrete, metal, sandstone, glass, and other materials capture the ethereal beauty of the cemeteries.

Reviews

A poignant, elegiac meditation on the material culture of death and remembrance.
-David Morgan, Ph.D., Professor of Religion, Duke University

Reviews

"I thought I was delving into a coffee table book containing rich and interesting photographs of cemeteries in the San Luis Valley. My own experience of seeing many back roads and corners of the Valley through a camera lens made me eager to view and study the images of a fellow photographer especially this particular book because it covered another of my great interests, cemeteries. But I had a surprise. The depth of narrative lifted this book out of the status of coffee table book into one of a valued resource on the San Luis Valley. With a camera as her tool, she documented the ways people make sense of death and life. Fragile folk art is at the core of her visual images, but the romantic and sacred meanings are the invisible messages portrayed through the pages of Grave Images"
-Center for Colorado & The West