Photographer

Meg Godfrey

Finalist in

Open Category

Written Statement

Like many, I have an interest in the morbid. Once we die, many of us are buried and it’s not us who choose how we are remembered, but our loved ones. The monuments left to mark where we are left eventually crumble as we are lost to time. Time forgets us all eventually, and the decay of what’s left of decorations and flowers symbolise this.

There’s something beautiful in the textures of decay that exist in cemeteries. A melancholic beauty surrounding death and grief. I took all of the photos in a cemetery on an overcast day so the lighting would be cool and consistent. I used a fast shutter speed and low ISO to shoot to make the images darker. To create the bokeh look, I used a 50mm lens. I chose to use landscape images and alter the colours; adding cyan, blue, magenta and yellow to each image to link the images as a series. Texture is shown in the broken iron railing with engraving, rust and exposed patches of metal beneath as well as in the gravel and granite. The wilted flowers are frayed and crisp, frozen in their dried state, and the cold gravestone is carved into the shape of a book and decayed to the point of illegibility. Its pages stained black by weather, age and moss.

Together, the images show the textures of decay within a graveyard. Once beautiful things changed and rendered gangrenous by rot and decay, now beautiful in an entirely different way.