Earlier this summer we took a trip to Buffalo, New York, and stopped by the Allentown Arts Festival. In conjunction with the festival, Trinity Church was opened up for the public to walk through, and I of course went in with my camera. The walls and windows were covered in memorials that I wanted to show.
I took a number of photos of stained glass windows with dedications, and luckily it was an overcast enough day that my photos were not all overexposed. Memorials like those in stained glass represent a kind of common cenotaph in our culture – we may be interred in a cemetery or churchyard (or even have our ashes scattered to the winds or the sea) but those we love put our names somewhere else that more people visit – on the bench at our favorite park, in stained glass at our church, in a memorial brick at our alma mater. People we knew who spent time in those places see our names and remember us, and those who never knew us read our names to themselves and wonder who we were and what we were like.
Usually the stained glass containing names is at the bottom in its own panel – sometimes I could get the whole window, but sometimes the light wasn’t quite right.
A Grave Concern 