Jan Christiaan Braun

Rambling through New York one day, Dutch photographer Jan Christiaan Braun ended up at a Queens cemetery, intending to find a good place to make a picture of the American flag. Instead, his attention was caught by a festively adorned gravestone with a striking wish: "Happy Birthday in Heaven." And so began the project gathered in this book--which records 144 of the most intensely decorated graves, some photographed serially in different celebratory regalia, from Valentine's Day to the Fourth of July to Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas. In Happy Together, Braun captures loving and creative expressions from New Yorkers of almost every conceivable cultural background in cemeteries in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island. Published to accompany Braun's exhibition at the 2007 Venice Biennale, curated by contributor Robert Storr, this volume also includes an essay by the renowned Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner.