Death Cannot Kill What Never Dies is an ongoing photographic project examining Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. Theorists have long positioned queerness against futurity and assimilation, instead encouraging an embrace of failure, loss, shame, and pain. By looking back at elements of queer culture that addresses these feelings, theorist Heather Love posits that we are better able to consider how this history continues to affect us.

Green-Wood Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark. It is an active cemetery, but its grounds also contain an arboretum, bird sanctuary, two apiaries, and host to art installations and performances. Because of its status as one of New York City’s earliest dedicated green spaces, it has become a prime site for not only the study of death, but of seasonal life cycles, public art, urbanization, and the cultural and climatic shifts from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

I view the cemetery as a site for queer feeling. In addition to recognized memorials, I seek to document “queer” monuments within the cemetery in the form of carvings made in trees, art installations, and temporary tributes of rocks, flags, and flowers placed by visitors. I photograph the headstones of queer permanent residents, as well as photographing fellow queer people as they experience the cemetery’s landscape. I ask my subjects to make a “backward turn” with me, examining the painful past our community endured in order to understand our present.