Mount Zion refers to an Orthodox Jewish cemetery in Queens, New York, built in 1893, sandwiched between a New York City Sanitation plant and the Long Island Expressway. ”Sepulchral portraits” refer to miniature photographs once placed on many of Mount Zion’s tombstones, a custom brought over by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. These images–often heavily retouched–were burned onto porcelain or metal tablets, and then glazed. The process was, at the time, advertised as permanent; but the ravages of the elements, pollution, and vandals have transformed these portraits into something else altogether. What remains of them–and what has become of them–is what John Yang has set out to portray in his own series of photographs, taken between 1994 and 1998. The result is a fiercely moving document, a meditation on morality, memory, the urban landscape, and the photographic process. Much like his subject matter, Yang’s photographs are themselves memorials–to Mount Zion, to its urban environment, to its occupants, to the gesture of its sepulchral portraits, and to photography itself.