Saving graces

the long version

Many cemeteries in Europe are highly maintained sculpture gardens strewn with shockingly sensual sculptures of women. They are perfect, idealized creations - young, gorgeous, elaborately posed, and beautifully sculpted. Often naked or barely clothed, and consumed with grief for the dead, they are both a stunning and a compelling presence among the other gravestones. David Robinson's exquisite photographs reveal the angelic beauty and mystery of these lifelike sculptures. In her foreword, Joyce Carol Oates explores the many implications of these grief-stricken, extremely provocative female figures - our obsession with mortality, the rituals of mourning, the conflation of death and the erotic, the perfect female form as a male fantasy and a symbol of status.