ABSTRACT
As we can see in two American cemeteries-one in Grand Butte, Colorado, and the other in Cooperstown, New York-ordinary human beings feel the need to memorialize individuals, to mark tiny spots on the globe with their names, to insert into the vastness of nature some small shape that challenges the forces of time. The richer and more powerful the person remembered, the larger the shape planted in the void. For some, such as an Egyptian Pharaoh, it is possible to build a form that rivals those of nature itself, be that a mountain or, as one colleague suggested, a giant sand dune. But the desire to erect monuments is as strong in the humble as in the rich and famous. Only the means are different. Walker Evans's photograph of a child's grave in Hale County, Alabama, published in 1936, shows a low mound that will flatten out after the first good rain, marked at both ends by pieces of scrap lumber that hardly have the staying power of the Pyramids at Gizeh. The child's bowl, perhaps its only possession other than clothes, lies atop the mound.
