Since David Octavius Hill, photographers have haunted cemeteries. They have had good reasons. Nothing takes the light more gratefully than a sheet of weathered marble, and a company of stones rising from the greensward is an irresistible opportunity for exercises in the organization of planes in space. Furthermore, photographers (locked as they are to the eternal present) have found in old monuments a way of touching at least the shadow of the past.
Nevertheless, the subject need not be regarded as inexhaustible, and after Paul Strand's great tombstone pictures one might have suspected that cemeteries had become a dead issue for serious photographers. George Krause's long series entitled "Qui Riposa" thus came as a surprise and a puzzle. Made in the 1960's the pictures were on the surface neither clearly innovative nor intellectually relevant; they should have seemed merely beautifully made photographs of conventional subjects. But they were moving and mysterious. It was as though Krause's pictures managed somehow to concern themselves not with social history, or old bones, or the art of the stone carver, or issues of abstract form, but with the presence of particular spirits.
Pictures that are formally or conceptually new can be discussed with relative ease, and perhaps with profit. More precisely, one discusses not the picture but some question of formal mechanics or intellectual posture related more or less closely to it, as a curruculum vitae or an obituary is related to a human being. Such discussions should not be scorned, for they can lead us closer to the picture's habitat. But the issue of the picture itself must finally be met without words.
John Szarkowski
from the Museum of Modern Art publication "Looking at Photographs", 1973