cemetery | Fotoeins Fotografie

Posts tagged ‘cemetery’

New West actor Raymond Burr

Fraser Cemetery

As a boy whose early memories include the family’s small black-and-white television from the 1970s, I remember the tv show “Ironside.” Canadian-born Raymond Burr played the titular character of Robert Ironside, special consultant for the San Francisco police department. Years later in the mid- to late-1980s, Burr returned as Perry Mason, the lead from the 1960s weekly tv-drama revived as a popular series of made-for-tv movies. He died in 1993, buried with members of his family in Fraser Cemetery, at home in New Westminster, B.C.

*Burr family grave at lower-centre – 9 Apr 2024 (iP15).*

*Raymond Burr (lower-right), with sister Geraldine, father William, and mother Minerva – 9 Apr 2024 (iP15).*

In 1858, the British established New Westminster as first- and capital-city of the new colony of British Columbia. Fraser Cemetery accepted its first burials in 1869.

I made all images above with an iPhone15 on 9 April 2024. Composed entirely within Jetpack for iOS, this post appears on Fotoeins Fotografie at fotoeins DOT com as https://wp.me/p1BIdT-sjD.

My Berlin: Minkowski space in Heerstrasse cemetery

Waldfriedhof Heerstrasse (Heerstrasse forest cemetery)

Is this a small park with plenty of trees, hilly terrain, and a small lake? Or is this simply a forest cemetery, a final resting spot for many prominent Berliners?

As part of an ongoing search for gravesites for physicists and mathematicians in Germany, I visited Berlin’s Friedhof Heerstrasse, near the city’s Olympic Stadium. Within the cemetery is Sausuhlensee lake, which settled into a former glacial gully, around which much of the cemetery came into being in 1924. Named after the early 20th-century Heerstrasse estate district whose residents were to be buried here, the cemetery stretches out over an area of almost 15 hectares (37 acres).

I found the grave for physicist Hermann Minkowski, but among the buried there are other “Promis” (prominent).

Friedhof Heerstrasse, Westend, Berlin, Germany, Deutschland, fotoeins.com

Forested park, forest cemetery.

The calm waters of Sausuhlensee lake on an autumn afternoon.

( Click here for images and more )

Vienna’s St. Marx Cemetery, Biedermeier style

Above/featured: Morning visit to the city’s Biedermeier cemetery – 20 May 2022.

In Vienna’s 3rd district, the St. Marx cemetery is the only surviving Biedermeier cemetery in the city. A visit now is a jump into the frozen past. The cemetery opened with its first burial in 1784. Closure of the city’s multiple neighbourhood cemeteries began in 1873 with the final burial at St. Marx taking place in 1874. Subsequent funerary functions were transferred to the newly constructed Zentralfriedhof located farther out from the city centre. The very leafy avenues and “leafy gate” are what’s left of the city’s only remaining 18th-century cemetery that is now open to the public as a city-administered park.

Why Biedermeier

Biedermeier in Vienna corresponds to a cultural period during the first half of the 19th-century marked by increased industrialization in rapidly urbanized areas and strict censorship with the elimination of dissenting political voices. Instead of looking outward to change, the artist and design community moved to safer spaces in nature or to their homes. While innovation might have given way to a modest yet graceful and functional style, Biedermeier architecture in its neoclassical spin provided inspiration for subsequent Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) and Secession movements. An important Viennese architect of the period was Josef Kornhäusel who designed many buildings in the city. Important music from this period was composed by, for example, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schubert, Schumann. One of the largest collections of Viennese Biedermeier art is in the Belvedere’s collection. St. Marx cemetery is a reflection of both city and age from the 19th-century.

St. Marxer Friedhof, St. Marx cemetery, Biedermeier cemetery, 3. Bezirk, Landstrasse, Wien, Vienna, Austria, Österreich, fotoeins.com

Cemetery entrance. Photo, 5 Jun 2023.

Main gate. Photo, 20 May 2022.

Address: Leberstrasse 6–8. Photo, 20 May 2022.

Information stone with visiting hours by month. Photo, 20 May 2022.

( Click here for images and more )

My Prague: Olšany cemetery, search for Kafka & Palach

Above/featured: A quiet leafy avenue in Prague’s Olšany Cemetery.

I can’t spend all this time in the Czech capital city, and leave without paying any respects to two 20th-century personalities of Prague. Franz Kafka was an early 20th-century German-Czech writer (e.g., 1912 Die Verwandlung/Metamorphosis), whose writings became known to the world posthumously, thanks to friend and fellow writer Max Brod. In the 1960s, Jan Palach was an important historical figure of opposition who died in protest against the Communist regime.

I’m in the underground metro, heading east from the city centre towards Vinohrady and beyond to Olšany. The sun’s out on a crisp mid-autumn day, and while deciduous trees are left wanting for leaves, the latter have piled like carpets of colour on the cemetery grounds. I’m looking for the graves of Palach and Kafka who are buried in Olšanské hřbitovy (Olšany Cemetery) and Nový židovský hřbitov (New Jewish Cemetery), respectively.

( Click here for images and more )

Seattle Lake View: Bruce & Brandon Lee

Honouring the surname

In the mid- to late-1970s, our parents took us to single-screen movie theatres with names like Olympia, Golden Harvest, and Shaw for cinema night to watch movies made in Hong Kong. There were dramas; some high on the melodrama and low on character. Some were historic-period pieces, and there were kung-fu movies for which Dad passed his love to me.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a kung-fu action sequence on a big screen. I was mesmerized the first time I laid eyes on a memorable fight scene set in Rome’s Colosseum, that epic scene observed by little stone dragons between “Little Dragon” himself, Bruce Lee, and Chuck Norris’ character in the 1972 film “The Way of the Dragon“. As a kid, I was proud to have had the same surname as this Bruce fellow, and memories of seeing his on-screen characters prevailing in fights have stuck over time (e.g., “Boards don’t hit back.”)

Tragically, Bruce and his son, Brandon, died too young. I’m certain when I was a teen that I asked where Bruce Lee was buried; my parents didn’t know and in pre-internet days, it was more of a challenge to find those answers. But the mystery has long been solved: Bruce Lee and his son, Brandon, lay side by side in Lake View Cemetery in Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Despite multiple visits to the city in years past, this particular return trip to Seattle has been decades in the making for a chance to honour a part of my childhood and a part of my heritage. When I find the Lees, my arrival means another answer has been quietly realized. On a crisp bright autumn morning under blue skies, I feel my father’s spirit with me; he never had the chance to come to this cemetery. My lips move without voice, a prayer I utter into the ether, pushing for hope to reach him. Because I know now that this, is also for my Dad.

(Click here for images and more )