Beauty lies at the intersection of death, place, memory and healing in VMFA’s latest offering in the photography gallery, “Home/Grown.”

Featuring the work of two contemporary Richmond-based photographers, Susan Worsham and Brian Palmer, the photographs highlight beauty as much as decay and death.

Representing Worsham are images from her series“Bittersweet on Bostwick Lane,” which originally debuted at Candela Gallery nearly a dozen years ago. The photographs explore loss and redemption as she attempts to come to terms with the suicide of her brother Russell. The photograph “Icing Fingers” (2014) draws on Worsham’s own childhood memories with an image of a young girl, a stand-in for Russell and herself, peering through an overgrown screened door.

After losing her brother, Worsham developed a close relationship with Margaret Daniel, an elderly neighbor whose memories of her brother and insights into life and death served as poetic inspiration for her photographs of children, landscapes and still lifes. One of the latter, “Light through Embalming Fluid,” marshals limpid, dreamy light in a delicate and intimate way, perhaps also pointing to how embalming fluid, like photography, allows the preservation of appearance after death.

Worsham’s place in the modern photography canon was cemented in 2012 when Oxford American Magazine named her one of their “100 Under 100: The New Superstars of Southern Art” and four years later, when VMFA acquired her 2009 photograph “Marine, Hotel near Airport, Richmond, Virginia.”

That work is included in another of VMFA’s recently opened photography exhibitions, “A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845.” Worsham has said that she’d never considered herself a Southern artist, before being included as one, but has finally realized that she brings home with her wherever she’s taking pictures. Here, that Southern slant is felt in works such as “Persimmon Grave,” where fallen, overripe persimmons atop a concrete container evoke nature’s cycle of bloom, decay and death.

For the artist, her process has always been as important as the end product. “It’s the seeing for me that’s the extraordinary part, the gift I feel lucky to have,” Worsham told Style in 2016. “Sometimes people don’t see the beauty around them until you show it to them in a picture. My images become my proof that beauty exists even in the most unlikely places.”

The same could be said for Palmer’s photographs of Henrico’s East End and Evergreen Cemeteries. The lush photographs of sacred spaces long neglected are as haunting and telling as they are exquisite.

East End Cemetery, founded in 1897, was a burial ground for an estimated 10 to 13,000 Black Richmonders. By the middle of the 20th century, it had reverted to nature because of Jim Crow policies that starved it of resources and marginalized the community it served. Palmer’s “Evergreen Cemetery, Richmond, Virginia” (2017) shows a densely overgrown landscape with only the merest suggestion of a path and no clear indication of gravestones anywhere. It’s striking in a “Mother Nature-goes-wild” sort of way, but only the photographer could identify the location.

It wasn’t until 2013 that efforts to restore East End Cemetery and its neighbor, Evergreen Cemetery, began. Palmer’s involvement began a decade ago when he came across a headstone in Williamsburg for his great grandfather, a former slave who’d fought for the Union Army.

When he moved to Richmond, Palmer and his wife joined volunteer efforts to reclaim East End Cemetery, while also photographing the project. Ultimately, he began to sense the humming life and spirit animating the hallowed spaces. In “East End Cemetery, Henrico County, October 9, 2020,” the luminous yet shadowy image seems to radiate, as if the spirits are just waiting for sundown, or the photographer, to be on the way.

Evergreen Cemetery was the final resting place for Richmond’ prominent Black residents, like Maggie Walker and Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell Jr. Even with notable individuals buried there, no resources existed for their perpetual care, and between segregation, vandalism and the economic disenfranchisement of Richmond’s Black community, Evergreen soon deteriorated, too.

Over the past ten years, volunteers have joined families and community members to rip out decades of overgrowth to uncover and restore over 3,300 headstones and graves. The hard work of family members is the subject of the evocative “Mr. Artie Jefferson tends to the burial plot of his life partner, Patricia Ann Hardy, Evergreen Cemetery, October 7, 2016.” The love and determination on Jefferson’s face speak to how much the effort means to him.

Perhaps nowhere is the dichotomy of how differently white and Black cemeteries in Richmond have been resourced and maintained more evident than in Palmer’s compelling “Diptych: Oakwood Cemetery, Confederate Section, May 23, 2015; Evergreen Cemetery, Veteran’s Day, November 11, 2015.” The image contrasts the well-kept, annually funded Oakwood Confederate section, complete with a Confederate flag flying high, with an image of active-duty U.S. soldiers carefully picking their way through the unkempt overgrowth of Evergreen Cemetery. As appalling as the comparison is, the roots of it are a deliberate reminder that the segregation and inequality established decades ago continues to shape people’s life and death experiences.

It’s a sobering reminder at the conclusion of a stunning photographic meditation on the intersection of death, place, memory and healing that every Richmonder would do well to experience.

“Home/Grown: Photographs by Susan Worsham and Brian Palmer” runs through April 6 at VMFA, 200 N. Arthur Ashe Boulvard. Vmfa.museum