Saturday 4 February 2012

Hell's Gate

I was so moved by an article in the Daily Mail about an old Leper Colony that resides just a few hundred yards from New York City on an  abandoned island in the East River NYC.
The haunting quality of the images reminds me of Joel Sternfeld's photographic study of Hart Island an island again situated in the river that runs alongside Manhattan that serves as a public burial ground for the city's unclaimed corpses.

The Island is unassessable to the public as it is run by the NYC's correctional facilities who's inmates are charged with the interment of forgotten and unwanted bodies into the mass graves that populate the Potter's Fields. The picture below is the grave of the first child to die of AIDS in NYC in 1985.

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