Continuing from last week, here are the clasped hands I referred to. It's the detail I like on this particular funerary monument, that one hand is clearly a woman's, with the decoration on her cuff and her bracelet with its locket. And I like the care with which the ribbons have been carved. These hands don't look anonymous — the stonemason has given them lives of their own.

A recent stroll in Abney Park Cemetery produced this image. The cemetery is packed with Victorian and twentieth-century gravestones and memorials, overflowing with religious and classical motifs — angels, broken columns, clasped hands and the like, all anticipating a heavenly embrace. What interests me about the car on this gravestone is that it contains no religious reference at all, if anything it would have been a status object in 1962 when car ownership was not nearly as commonplace as it is today — an aspirational gravestone perhaps?

 

I read recently in the Guardian newspaper that over Easter, British children each consume, on average, the weight of a newborn baby in chocolate Easter eggs.

This image is from an exhibition at the Wilmotte Gallery in London. From 2005 French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre collaborated over a five-year period to photograph Detroit's abandoned buildings. Their images are compelling, as though the city has been abandoned by its population, falling into decay but still echoing with its former inhabitants' presence. As a child I played in abandoned buildings, and these buildings held a faint remnant of human presence, but they were submerged in a larger, bustling landscape, whereas downtown Detroit seems to have had its living presence hollowed out. And perhaps what adds to this quality of strangeness is that it's taking place in north America, a place of the new and the future. If Detroit were a person, it would be Miss Havisham. To see more of Marchand and Meffre's images, click here. 

I’ve recently come across the work of the Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin. He photographs existing buildings in and around Ghent, where he lives. Then he transforms them into fictional structures, uses digital collaging techniques. Some of these transformations are quite dizzying to behold, but I particularly liked this image because it took me a while to work out where the fiction had occurred. His fictional buildings are almost believable. If you’d like to see more of his work, plus a thoughtful selection of sheds, click on www.filipdujardin.be.