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Obermann's Jenna Hammerich wanted to know more....
Who’s your local gravedigger? Do you know? Do you have one? The residents of Cherryfield, Maine, do—and it’s not the dirty, shadow-clad figure you’re picturing. It’s local resident Everard Hall, smiling and ball-capped in a plaid work shirt. There’s a harmonica in his pocket and dancing boots in his pickup. Everard (pronounced “EVer-ard”) is one of the few remaining gravediggers in the U.S. who dig by hand—and he does it year-round across northeastern Maine. Using picks, shovels, chains, and winches to haul out rocks, ice, hardpan, roots, clay, and sand, he insists on doing the job with care and precision. It’s not surprising that UI photography professor Thalassa Raasch feels the exact same way about documenting Everard’s work. Her in-progress collection of photos and essays, In Over My Head, documents the unexpected beauty of Everard’s work as a gravedigger and explores the profound thresholds between solitude and community, life and death.
From the moment she read about him in a local newspaper, Raasch (Art & Art History, CLAS) knew she had to collaborate with Everard on a project. “I thought he sounded really interesting,” she recalls, “so I called him and said, ‘I want to come see what you’re doing and make some photographs.’” Everard invited her—then a student in Portland, Maine—to join him in a cemetery the very next day, where he was filling in a grave. “I had no idea at the time that it’d become kind of an obsession and fascination for me,” Raasch smiles.
(Photograph above: Dessert, 2015, by Thalassa Raasch)
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