Allan Ludwig


Allan Ira Ludwig was an American historian and photographer. His book Graven Images played a role in the rise of interest in Puritan era gravestone studies which began in the 1960s. He also used the pseudonym Elisha Cook Jr. when documenting street art and graffiti art.

Early life and education

Ludwig was born in Yonkers, New York, on June 9, 1933, to Saul Ludwig and Honey Ludwig. His father was a textile manufacturer and his mother was a homemaker. After being introduced to the arts by his mother, he began drawing as a child. When he was 13 years old, he was taught to use a camera by a neighbor.
Ludwig attended Yale University beginning in 1952. He graduated in 1964 with a PhD in art history. His dissertation was on gravestones, which led to his future work as a photographer on that topic.

Career

Ludwig is best known for his series of 256 photographs of gravestones, published as Graven Images. His work built on the research of scholar Harriette Merrifield Forbes, an early pioneer in the study New England gravestone art, who is referred to as the "Founding Mother" of gravestone studies by philosopher of science James Blachowicz.
Critic and writer Greil Marcus described Ludwig's book as an "extraordinary work" and compared it to encountering a "vanished community trying to make sense of itself through art." Ludwig's book helped popularize the study of American gravestones, with Blachowicz describing him as the "founding father" of gravestone studies, with Forbes as the "founding mother".
In the 1960s, Ludwig also produced a series of images shot in Rome of Renaissance tombs. In the 1990s, he collaborated with Gwen Akin on a series of grotesque photographs of preserved body parts shot at the Mütter Museum, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Their collaborative work was included in the Beyond Ars Medica exhibition at Thread Waxing Space in New York City.
Later in his life, he photographed street art and graffiti, which he admired as an international art movement that he compared to pop art. His photographs of graffiti and street art were created under the pseudonym Elisha Cook, Jr. In addition to his work as a photographer, Ludwig was a professor of fine arts at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Bloomfield College and Syracuse University.

Personal life and death

Ludwig was first married to Janine, with whom he began exploring graveyards after losing "their way on the back roads of Connecticut" one day in 1955. He married his second wife, Gwen Akin, fellow photographer, in 1992, with whom he collaborated on projects. Ludwig died of congestive heart failure at a senior living facility in Manhattan on November 2, 2025, at the age of 92.

Collections

The collection of Ludwig's photographs of Renaissance sculptures shot in Rome is held in the archives of Yale University. The Yale Arts Library holds an additional collection of 150 of his photographs in their Allan Ludwig Photograph Collection of New England Gravestones. The Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst holds hundreds of his photographs in their Association for Gravestone Studies Collection.
In Washington, D.C., the National Gallery of Art houses 357 works in his photographic series "Photographic and historical study of New England gravestone carving from 1653 to 1810". The Boston Athenæum holds a collection of 498 of his photographs, while the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution holds in their permanent collection, "The graven images of New England : 1653–1800 by Allen Ludwig, ", consisting of approximately 500 photographs by Ludwig.

Books

  • Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650–1815
  • Reflections Out of Time, Part III: A Portfolio of Photographs
  • ''Repulsion: Aesthetics of the Grotesque''