I’ve been having a certainly wonderful and kind of ecstatic email conversation with the author Haven Kimmel.  We started on the topic of Avedon and Ezra Pound, but quickly found ourselves immersed in topics as various a Faulkner and God, insomnia and work, Milanese art collectors and, then of course, wedding gowns, taxidermic lions in the rearing-ferociously position and inordinately sized dogs in the sleepy-supine position, and, so on and so forth.  At some point in the conversation Haven pointed to the Southern photographer John Rosenthal.  Excellent!  Needless to say, knowing my proclivities, you’ll quickly understand why I think this is brilliant work, or to quote Haven, “ambrosia.”

photo: Wilmington, North Carolina, 1977. © John Rosenthal

And of this second picture I’ll quote Kimmel again who explained the print to me, “Rosenthal was walking through a cemetery in Wilmington, NC, and he came across this man digging a grave.  It turns out it was the family’s cemetery for three generations, and they allowed no machinery over the graves, so everything was dug by hand.  Bellamy [the gravedigger] was a man of intense pride and dignity.  Rosenthal asked him if he could take a photograph of him, and Bellamy, ‘You may take one.’  And this is it:”

photo: Pine Hill Cemetery, Wilmington, NC, 1990. © John Rosenthal

I feel like the universe just grew.