"Widowed at the young age of twenty-four," writes photographer Kathy Hettinga in the introduction to her visually evocative and lyrically composed book, "I found comfort in the shared sorrow of the cemeteries." Hettinga's documentary study of homemade grave markers in southern Colorado's San Luis Valley is a personal, spiritual and cultural study of the most thoughtful, probing and perceptive sort.

Hettinga's introductory narrative describes the history of the San Luis Valley: settled by Hispanic Catholics, it was always poor and always expressed its community's faith through its attention to death. Too poor to pay for professional graves residents of the Valley created their own grave markers, some fashioned out of sheet metal, others out of concrete or simply wood.



Hettinga's work juxtaposes close intensity -- her arresting photograph of The Sorrowing Head of Christ, a commercially made plaster statue or her close-up of a sandstone carving of a horse to commemorate the death of a four month old baby -- with wide shots that reveal the monuments in their geographical context -- the grave site full of colorful flowers surrounded by candles in brown paper bags or the San Acacio Cemetery, many of its graves dotted with American flags or the San Luis Valley's sprawling field and sky.



Grave images in the San Luis Valley "reveal people living and dying in the profound reality of place." It is a sense of place that Hettinga is interested in preserving because in the San Luis Valley, as elsewhere, it is so increasingly lost. The loss of place, she argues, is a loss very worth lamenting: physical spaces are increasingly replaced with virtual ones, and few areas like the San Luis Valley cemeteries, which she characterizes as memento mori, remain. Her epilogue points out that during the fifteen years she has been documenting these grave images and markers, many have become damaged by weather or vandalized and she now believes that some of the cemetery art should be placed in museums. An appendix includes a comprehensive list of the San Luis Valley cemeteries and valuable information about each one.

This is simply an amazing book. Rarely does a work so exquisitely or effectively combine cultural history, cultural criticism, personal narrative and documentary photography to reveal physical, aesthetic and spiritual spaces. Hettinga herself best sums up what her images and text so splendidly illustrate, that "the invisible is in the visible." —Joscelyn Jurich