“I made these pictures last May (2014) during a drive around rural northeastern Indiana, near where I was born.

I stopped at the cemetery where my grandparents on my mother’s side are buried, and where my (still living) parents already have headstones with their names and dates of birth on them. It’s a pretty remote location, surrounded by a lot of farmland.

All around the cemetery are these manicured evergreen shrubs. I’ve always been amused by their intense presence — comforting and watchful, but also mysterious, impenetrable, and dark.

I spent about 90 minutes quickly photographing as many of them as I could (trying not to draw attention to my behavior). Looking at them later, they seemed like a twist on Sontag’s comment that ‘all photographs are memento mori.‘” - Mike Slack