A Grave Situation
Writen by Robert Wong with a body of work that is timeless My Approach to the Enormous Task of Photographing and Inventorying the Chinese Cemetery in Maitland, Cape Town, South Africa. Photographs are windows to a moment in time. Both family history and community history are recorded in words chiseled in the stones of the local graveyard - and because that record is waiting to be read, recorded, transcribed, and preserved, I worked with collecting gravestone information and gravestone photographs at the Chinese Cemetery. There is NO complete inventory of the Chinese Cemetery In Maitland and is one of the oldest cemeteies in South Africa and an inventory is long overdue. And over the next weeks and months I plan to write such an inventory. I have always been interested in recording tombstone images, and learning about unique stories, traditions and customs concerning cemeteries. When I am at the cemetery, I always look for the unusual, the unique or the strange. But the major reason to do this is to learn of the history of the Chinese community and of its people. I consider a tombstone and the information chiseled in stone a word picture into the past. And it is that “picture of the past� I am trying to collect as I photograph gravestones and transcribe the words and information written upon them.