Landscapes can be read on many levels - landscape as nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth, ideology, history, place and aesthetic.

Tombscapes - Viewshed Analysis

In attempting to understand the historic landscape, the views created by the landscape are as important as the collection of material objects which inhabit it. Viewshed analysis provides documentation of the spatial and material composition of the landscape through time. In examining historic photographs of St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, viewshed analysis reveals changes in vegetation, paving materials, the condition of tombs, walls and other built cemetery features, as well as recording the site's surrounding features at the time of the photograph. Viewshed analysis also suggests spatial changes brought about the addition or removal of the site's physical fabric from one time to another.

In addition to its use as material and spatial documentation, historic views recorded by photographers and artists provide insight into the nature of landscape perception historically, giving a sense of the greater cultural processes that lay behind the perception and representation of designed landscapes.

Historic photography of the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 was composed primarily to capture two phenomena of the cemetery's unusual layout. The first photographic technique was to convey the density of the tomb collection, with tombs encroaching upon tight pockets of space, giving an intimate, almost claustrophobic feeling to the cemetery's paths and open spaces.

The second technique focused on providing something closer to a roof-top view, revealing the complexity and variety of the cemetery's organization as seen from above. These photographs often include rooftops of neighboring buildings, heightening the cemetery's play with architectural form and scale.

Whether the pictures were taken from the 'street-level' or of the 'skyline', the depiction of the cemetery as a miniaturized, ultra-urban city of the dead was of primary importance.

Opening quote: D.W. Meinig, "The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene," The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, 33.