I have a history of working with monument plaques. When I tell adults that, they don’t recall ever seeing tomb photographs of the dead staring out in all the cemeteries or burial grounds they have experienced. I grew up near Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio, and don’t remember ever not seeing them. Photographic plaques have surfaced in my work, as a natural outgrowth of my interests.

In 1990 I started working with an Italian porcelain tomb plaque company for my 1993 exhibition entitled “My Yard” at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. In that show, I examined the major themes I had experienced in my (then) 25 years of exploring, contemplating, and photographing cemeteries. My themes were the tree of life, hands clasped or pointing to the Other Side, and the children’s ethereal section. I made sculptures on each theme. I decided to incorporate my photographs as factual information within obelisk forms. A Columbus monument company gave me the name of the Italian company. The Rossato Company, I learned, did mainly computer-derived images on porcelain, but of very high quality. For the Wexner show, I sent my photos to them and received finished plaques to be placed in my bronze, tile, mosaic, and refractory works.
In 2000 I went to Vicenza to make plaques I had generated in glazed porcelain. These were incorporated into “Oddluck,” a sculpture I had been working on for two years. The plaques I brought to Italy were the “Twist of Fate” plaques to be nestled within the 12x10-foot floor sculpture. Again the plaques carried the factual, photographic information in the piece. It was difficult to take all the work to Italy myself – I hurt my back! And communication was not great. I don’t think they understood I was looking for a more hands-on experience. On my return, I discovered a Dedouch Company plaque in the Columbus pet cemetery.

In Columbus, we have a great pet cemetery located near the airport. The huge cemetery dates from the late 1800s. There is a pedigree pup section which resembles the military section in our human ones. There are Victorian graves, which I presume resemble their owners’ style. There are home remedy and kitsch monuments, too. It seems that everything repressed in human cemeteries is given free rein in pet cemeteries.

I’ve organized Brown Pet Cemetery picnics for students and friends in Ohio State’s Art Department, where I’m a Professor of Art. On this solo visit, I planned to re-attach any fixable broken parts (there was a lot of vandalism there). I saw the name “J.A. Dedouch Co., Chicago, Illinois” on the back of a loosened plaque. The plaque bore a tinted, exquisitely detailed photograph of a collie running out of the woods with the epitaph, “Doc 1910-1923.”

I went home and found the Dedouch Co. phone number, then confirmed they were still in business. When I asked to speak to the president, I was connected with Richard Stannard. I explained my art and interests and how I had worked with a photographic tomb plaque company in Italy for the past ten years. I proposed to come to Chicago, work alongside the other artists on the (beautiful!) copper enamel plaques, and learn the complete process to utilize with my own drawings, photographs, and collages.

In June 2003, I went to Chicago to begin my makeshift residency. The J.A. Dedouch Company had been making memorial portraits in Oak Park since 1893. They were one of the only companies still doing the color work by hand – combined with a unique photo process. The company remained in its original location, a single-story brick building on a shady street next to apartment buildings. From the outside, the tomb plaque company could have been a dentist’s office. It was very light industry.

On my way into Dick Stannard’s office, I noticed he used one of the copper-enameled tomb plaques as an ashtray. I loved it. Before we met, I’d worried about his curmudgeonly voice on the phone, that my request had put him off and he wouldn’t allow me to do my work. In retrospect, many of his questions tried to fathom my interest. I was the first artist to come in and do the work myself. I believe he was more open to me because times were hard and mourners were going to the computer decal companies, rather than requesting this hand-method, which of course was more expensive.

After I toured the J.A. Dedouch factory and took some Polaroids, I went to a friend’s house to figure out which images of mine would best utilize this photographic and painterly process. Sitting at my friend’s table, I leafed through my gift from Dick Stannard, a November 2001 issue of American Funeral Director magazine. A back-box ad caught my eye. Its white lettering said, “Live a little. Mortware. Computer technology that saves you time.” Once again I noted that grief, compassion, empathy, and despair go hand in hand with humor and kitsch in the process of death and burial.

I decided to work with the sepia or “black” photographic method. The photos (or photos of drawings and collages in my case) were fused on at 1450 degrees F. It was a bichromate process, where the light tones were “pounced” off with cotton under glass. The “black” (black-and-white) plaques were finished without color. The sepia ones were hand-colored with overlays of china paint airbrushed or painted on. It took a year to train a person to match the colors in an original photo. A skilled painter could finish four colored plaques a day. The artists wore intense magnifying lenses in front of their glasses to see the intricate details.

I must say what a joy it was to work with the photographic emulsion before the black or iron image was fused on. It was a sketcher’s dream. By gently, gently dry-brushing into the image, you could make the whites sparkle, creating more depth and greater contrast. If a section of the image was too dark, you could coax it back into visibility. It was such intimate work, with your nose six inches from the image. With magnifying glasses and bright light combined, you could pick up the tiniest nuances in the image. It was mesmerizing.

The color work was fused on at 1350 degrees F in a 75-year-old kiln built by the company founder, Dick’s grandfather. It looked like a large circular train set, with a refractory kiln set up where the cave would be. The copper or steel plaques were in the kiln for 15 minutes, heating and cooling on either end.

Rejected plaques got fired over and over to establish the correct temperature for the good plaques. As the copper on them melted, the portraits dissolved back to nature. The plaques still carried strong remnants of the dissolving photo. The textures might be out of whack, but the glasses were still clear. Hair began to look like a tangle of lightning bolts, while the skin reticulated into the enamel, creating different scales and quantities of beading on the white enamel background. These “second” plaques were amazing treasures. Dick gave me some.

While I marveled at the singular kiln and related equipment, one of the workers peeked in on me to say, “Welcome to the industrial revolution.”

There was something that seemed sad to me, poignant and fleeting, both about what the company does and in the self-depreciating way the staff realized they were doing a painstaking process in a time no longer sought these “Lasting Images” (as they were called on the sign greeting you in the reception area). Many of the shelves meant to hold in-process plaques were empty. In the painting area were three times as many painting stations as artists to do the painstaking color work. 15 years ago, there were 20-some artists.

The six artists still employed there were very helpful. Everyone stopped their work when they saw me messing up or forgetting some of the numerous steps while I worked. Even though they were paid by piecework, they willingly answered my questions. They were workaholics, arriving to work between 6:00-6:30 a.m.

Vicki, the art director, became a friend. At 42, she started at age 18 and basically grew up with the company. Snippets of conversations wafted over to my ventilated, well-lit working station next to hers. While working on the portraits, she sold real estate and her family had a business managing reggae bands.

One artist, Amy, commented how strange the selected photograph of the deceased could be. A ridiculous picture of a guinea pig came in to prove her point. It was just hair and an eye, but out of focus. We all hooted and laughed, but Kathy said, “I’ll do my best for it.”

 I really enjoyed the people and their company. If there had been a job available, I would have signed up. There were two men and four women artists, who all went to art or graphic design school. Everyone was in their 40s or slightly older, although they hired Amy a year ago and she was only 25. There was great concern about the company closing.

My own work went well. I was informed I’m a “quick study.” I made each image in the iron (gold tone) and black so that I could try as many things as possible. While the artists worked for exact color reproduction, I subjectively altered the colors to make the plaques into something my original images never were. I worked on three sets of projects:

1. Continuing my bathroom interests, I used photographs and collages and watercolors of toilets from the Headlands barracks and the prison on Alcatraz from my residency at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts.
2. Related to my funerary works, I used images, collages of wilted flowers, and clippings from deceased friends and family. The collages originated from photos I took of flowers under glass with a black towel behind them. They had an exciting, vibrant “leaves on a window” effect. These developed into groupings of the same wilted flower repeating, which became bruised as the plaques progressed. One had the flower skeletonized, as if made of bone.
3. Finally, I used images of collections of things. These were mostly experiments. I think the title will be “Things I haven’t lost...yet.”

Before I left, Dick Stannard told me, “I’m sick to death of this business.” He teased me for being weird for showing such enthusiasm for something that, as he put it, he’s been around since earliest childhood. He was proud, though, to show me a book his high school classmate Jay Ruby put out on MIT Press in 1995, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Of course it has a chapter on the J.A. Dedouch Company.

I think that, working there, it would be hard to concentrate on re-creating the tonal likeness of the deceased, just like it’s odd to see the finished plaques in cemeteries. Each time as I gazed at a dead person at Dedouch, I had the same conversation with the image: “You have done it. You have died. Here you are. This plaque conveys permanence, but you do not.” This conversation never seemed redundant to me. It made me remember what my mother told me about being a nurse in Cleveland’s V.A. Hospital: “With all this pain and suffering, you have to have a sense of humor.”

Unfortunately, J.A. Dedouch Company went under in the winter of 2004. The building was being bulldozed for an apartment building. I was very sad, but grateful for the people I’ve met and that I got my work done in time.