Photographer Page

Katie Thornton

Brookwood is still in operation and remains the largest cemetery in the United Kingdom. Today, South Western Railway trains can take visitors there from London

A second view of a Singapore Columbarium. Some of these facilities have been used to house the remains of exhumed remains from cemeteries repurposed for other use.

Katie Thornton: "Just as headstones weather and crumble, digital memorials also have a shelf life. After adding augmented reality videos to headstones in Bristol’s Arnos Vale Cemetery just six years ago, media-maker Jeremy Routledge and death academic Dr. John Troyer try in vain to reanimate an Augmented Reality story of the individual buried in this grave. In this instance, the stone had weathered too much to be recognized by the technology. Instead they used a photograph of the grave as it appeared six years ago. Just like physical cemeteries, digital cemeteries require maintenance."

Gravestones that fail the strength-testing process are laid flat to prevent injury. But such safety precautions have given many cemeteries a look of disrepair. Though the graves pictured here are quite old, many of the collapsed stones are much newer, demonstrating a decrease in the quality of masonry.

Katie Thornton: "Sue Stearn and a team of dedicated volunteers reanimate and digitally document fading grave inscriptions at the Embsay village churchyard using Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) technology. RTI uses composite photography and strategically-placed lights to reveal text no longer visible to the human eye."

Katie Thornton: "Whether it’s stonemasonry, laser etching, or mobile apps, cemetery spaces have always utilised new technologies. In a project they called “Future Cemetery,” Media-maker Jeremy Routledge (Calling the Shots Media) and death academic Dr. John Troyer (University of Bath) used Augmented Reality to provide visitors to Bristol’s Arnos Vale Cemetery with a more complex understanding of the individuals buried beneath their feet. “[Cemeteries] will change as different forms of communication technology emerge and disappear,” stays Troyer. “The digital tools we used are no different.” Augmented Reality, they felt, added depth to the site without altering its historic nature."

Katie Thornton: "Memorial landscapes are always in flux. Cities grow, and cemeteries get swallowed up. Stones weather and crumble from disuse. Digital technologies may be more accessible than expensive, stone memorials, but they have dangerously short shelf lives. In this crucial moment of change, British cemetery staff, neighbours, technologists, gravediggers, undertakers, and artists are changing the ways and places in which we remember the dead."

Katie Thornton: "Every week, Mary Laurie, 71, dons garden gloves and volunteers clearing weeds and brambles from headstones at Bristol’s Arnos Vale cemetery. She’s already purchased her burial plot—in the woodland burial section, where there are no memorial markers. “You don’t need a lump of stone to be remembered,” Laurie says. “If they love you, they’ll remember you.”"

Katie Thornton: "A headstone appears to offer an opportunity to vie for immortality. In a cemetery, a passerby can recall the name of the dead, generations after the end of a bloodline. But permanence is questioned in London’s Highgate Cemetery as a tree easily dislodges a headstone, threatening to topple it. Graves nearby stand crooked and worn, their stories covered by ivy."

Katie Thornton: "Cemeteries may be more diverse and representative than many public repositories of history, such as monuments and statues. But they are still far from universally accessible. In the Victorian era, families would go broke paying for large memorial markers that demonstrated--and often exaggerated--their social and economic status. Though grandiose memorials are no longer so popular, funeral poverty is at an all-time high, meaning many people go into debt to deal with the remains of their loved ones. Only by comparing the physical headstones to cemetery records and death records can we see who excluded from our memorial landscapes—and paint a more complete picture of English society, past and present."