BOHEMIA

Founded in 1877 by Czech immigrants in Chicago after one of their own was denied Catholic burial for failing a required religious observance, Bohemian National Cemetery became a landscape of funerary statues that still embody that founding refusal. These photographs isolate the hooded bronzes and weathered figures under heightened tonal intensity, rendering them as independent sculptural presences in which death is neither softened nor distant. What remains is a study of how a community’s insistence on liberty continues to inhabit the bodies of its dead, and how those bodies continue to address the living.