Photographing, Montjuic Cemetery – Part 1

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving.  What you have captured on film is captured forever…it remembers the little things long after you have forgotten everything. ~ Aaron Siskind

I love photographing cemeteries.  I know this and recently I actually asked myself why.  I can think of a lot of factors.  My fascination/fear of death, the beautiful quiet that you often find at cemeteries, the care taken in creating the monuments, the pure aesthetic beauty of the setting and monuments.  It does seem to me to be at one level kind of morbid, but I can’t get past how really beautiful the photos come out, and how much I enjoy shooting in cemeteries.  So as you can tell I really haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer.

On the way to Barcelona I did a Google search on things to do in Barcelona.  One of the things that came up in the search was Montjuic Cemetery.  So I found an afternoon and headed off to the cemetery, although cemetery seems an insufficient definition of Montjuic.  First, it’s a mountain, literally a mountain of dead people, carefully laid out as a city of the dead.  In one section the crypt numbers are above 20,000+ which is really amazing to me and that may only have been for that section.

Montjuic was a really amazing place and by far my favorite monument is the one below.  A monument depicting a man with his foot on the throat of a turtle while holding a double-sided axe.  I have no idea how this imagery related to the deceased and I love it because it is by far the most bizarre monument I have ever encountered.

I shot for over four hours on Mountjuic and honestly I hope to return some day and shoot for two full days because I covered such a small part of the mountain.  Below are a bunch of images from the cemetery, enjoy. ~ Rev Kane