Mt. Sion: Sepulchral Portraits

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Rexer, Lyle

John Yang is a haunter of cities, an archaeologist with a camera, a discoverer of lost things and unnoticed details, a real-life Julius Knipple. And though his craftsmanship seems out of time and place, it's impossible to imagine John Yang's art in any other period.

Eugene Atget surveyed the whole of Paris. Yang seeks the fragment. Out beyond the endless highway reticulations where Brooklyn abuts Queens, Yang has taken his View camera into a city of the dead-Mt. Zion Cemetery in Maspeth, Queens. This 80-acre preserve of stone is one of the first sights that greet visitors coming into New York from LaGuardia Airport, and its 180,000 markers seem to mirror the living city beyond. For Yang, Mt. Zion seems to represent the heart of the city, its memories, sadness, and losses. He has toured Mt. Zion, taking closeups of a prominent feature of its Orthodox Jewish tombstones-miniature photos of the deceased. Burned into porcelain or metal, most have decayed, faded, or otherwise suffered the ravages of time. The fall into time gives the images their poignancy, of course, but Yang's framing and expansion give them a power they couldn't have had in situ. One particular image shows a commanding young woman wearing a locket containing a miniature, and we suddenly find ourselves in a hall-of-mirrors, of image within image within image, each referring, through its decay, to the human body that lies under the stone. With time's transformation as his theme, Yang has turned the very process of photography into metaphor. He uses printing out paper, allowing his images to emerge gradually with exposure to light and contact with the negative. He recovers an antique image by recovering an antiquarian process.

Yang is not the only photographer attracted to cemeteries, especially Jewish ones. Just a few years ago, Stephen Sack in Belgium created a similar series, including, as well, evocative fragments of tombstone lettering. But Yang qualifies the nostalgia of the project by locating the cemetery within its visual context. In several sequences, beginning with local street scenes and ending with a panoramic montage of the surrounding cityscape, Yang places Mt. Zion in the midst of garbage trucks, storage sheds, waste disposal plants, and apartment buildings. If Mt. Zion is the city's heart, it is a neglected one. It seems that death and mourning are just industrial events, like street cleaning.

Or perhaps not. Burial practices have changed over the millennia. Where once they were community rituals bounded bv taboo, now they are private ceremonies for the purpose of remembering and preserving individual identity. Photography grew up with this transformation and furthered it. The camera promised to rescue evidence of the person from the impersonal flow of events called history. The failure of that project the eclipse of the individual and the effacing of identity-is where contemporary photography begins.

Mount Zion: Sepulchral Portraits, Photographs by John Yang Published by D.A.P./ Distributed Art Publishers, 2001. 7-1/4" x 10-- 1/4", 112 pages, 88 photographs. $35, (hardcover)

Lyle Rexer is the author of Antiquarian Avant-garde: the New Wave in Old-Process Photography, to be published in 2002. He writes on art and culture for many publications, including The New York Times, Art in America and Art on Paper. He reviewed John Yang's book Mount Zion: Sepulchral Portraits, page 103.