I spent much of today hanging out in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. Mountain View Cemetery is where some of the richest families of San Francisco are buried, Crockers, Ghiradellis, Bechtels, Merritts, they all have a presence — some bigger than others.
There’s something I find absurd about the glory of burial and the importance of status even when one is gone. I find that I get very reflective when I shoot cemeteries, but then predictably the reflectiveness of it all wears off and the death around me becomes routine. Every so often I’ll catch a glimpse of a three year old baby who died 100 years ago and my mind will digest that for a bit and then it’s back to the same old nothingness of my shoot.
There are a lot of famous people buried in Mountain View Cemetery. It certainly seems *the* place to be buried in the Bay Area, for what that’s worth. They have a section called millionare’s row. Someday maybe they’ll also have a billionaires row. Famous architect Julia Morgan is buried there. So is Andre Hicks (aka Mac Dre) the Northern California Rapper who was shot to death.
Anyways, there is some beautiful sculpture work there and other interesting ways to look into the City of Oakland. Here’s the set of the images that I shot.
While looking through some of your smartsets, I was wondering how one is supposed to browse through these on Zooomr? When you follow a thumbnail link to a photo, how do you go to the next photo in the set, do you have to go to back to the index page? Will you make this more obvious in the next Mark X release?
do you know which section of mountain view cemetary andre hicks is buried?