In 1955, Allan Ludwig, an art historian and photographer, made a wrong turn while driving to a pig roast in rural Connecticut.
As evening approached, he told The New York Times years later, he and his wife, Janine, “saw this beautiful graveyard on the top of a hill.” The couple explored the Colonial-era burial site as the light struck at an angle that amplified the carvings on the gravestones.
That wrong turn became a fortunate misstep, leading to the publication in 1966 of “Graven Images: New England Stonecarving and Its Symbols, 1650-1815.” Mr. Ludwig’s book, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, contained scholarly analysis and 256 black-and-white plates of gravestone images he photographed, inspiring a reassessment of Puritan funerary art and contesting the widely held notion that the imagery was meaningless.
“The more I discovered, the more I became convinced that here was the early religious art of New England,” he wrote.
Mr. Ludwig died on Nov. 2 at a senior-living facility in Manhattan. He was 92.
His daughter Katherine Ludwig Jansen said the cause was congestive heart failure.
“Graven Images” built on the research of Harriette Merrifield Forbes, an author and historian who pioneered modern gravestone studies in the 1920s when she documented 17th- and 18th-century headstones in New England. But Mr. Ludwig was the “first to consider this art in depth as a meaningful aesthetic-spiritual expression,” Wesleyan University Press noted when it published his book.
Mr. Ludwig and Ms. Forbes were the “founding father and mother” of gravestone studies, James Blachowicz, the author of two books about early American gravestone carving traditions in Massachusetts and a professor emeritus of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, said in an interview.
The Puritans were Protestant reformers who believed that God had chosen some people for salvation, while others were destined for hellfire. They rejected the ornamentation found in Catholic churches as a distraction, and evidence of vanity.
Mr. Ludwig wrote of the paradox of the American Puritans, whose ancestors destroyed a considerable amount of religious sculpture and ornaments in England before departing for the New World, where they developed their own religious art in the 17th century.
In New England, he wrote, the Puritans began to express their “hopes and fears in the face of the mysteries of death and resurrection” through symbolism carved on gravestones — a “burning need” that overcame their aversion to statues, crosses and other adornments they considered idolatrous.
The Puritans turned to art, he observed, “when confronted with the awful immensity of death and the long voyage of the soul.”
The winged skull, or death’s head, was an early reminder of inevitable demise, followed later by what might be considered more hopeful symbols of loss and rebirth, including winged cherubs and willow trees overhanging an urn.
“After 1668,” Mr. Ludwig wrote, “no Puritan family was ready to commit its loved ones to the cold earth without an appropriate cluster of symbols hovering protectively over the grave.”
Allan Ira Ludwig was born on June 9, 1933, in Yonkers, N.Y., the only child of Saul Ludwig, who worked in Manhattan as a textile manufacturer, and Honey (Fuchs) Ludwig, who ran the household and introduced her son to the fine and performing arts.
He began drawing as a child, but struggled to depict faces, especially noses. “It drove me crazy,” he told Street Art NYC in 2013. “I decided that it would be much easier for me to capture a face with a camera.”
From 1952 to 1964, he studied at Yale, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts before getting his Ph.D. in art history; his dissertation became the basis for “Graven Images.”
A theatrical figure and avid storyteller, Mr. Ludwig taught at a handful of universities, including the Rhode Island School of Design, Syracuse University, Bloomfield College in New Jersey and Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., where he was known to dress as a satyr, Ms. Ludwig Jansen said, while lecturing on the paintings of Caravaggio.
As a photographer, Mr. Ludwig explored various subjects, including the macabre. He collaborated with the photographer Gwen Akin, whom he married in 1992 after his first marriage ended in divorce, on a series of grotesque images exhibited in a group show in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
Using the platinum printing process, they produced hauntingly beautiful images of horrific subjects — sliced heads preserved in formaldehyde, skeletons of fused twins — taken at the Mütter Museum, the medical history museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The images were later published in a 2003 book.
“I think we’re all drawn to the grotesque,” Ms. Akin said in an interview. “You know how people slow down to look at a traffic accident.”
A 1995 review of the show in The New York Times was dismissive of their attempts “to heighten the powerful mixture of fascination and repulsion” elicited by the subject matter, calling the photographs “largely extraneous.” But Mr. Ludwig saw a double standard in those who found his study of the grotesque off-putting.
“If this is done under the cloak of science, it becomes palatable,” he told The Times in 2003. “Scientists get a cultural free pass. They say they are not interested in the macabre stuff, but there they are in the lab sawing skulls apart.”
Mr. Ludwig made hundreds of photographs of Renaissance tombs in Rome. He also had a passion for graffiti and street art — which he called “the most important international movement in world art since American pop art” — that began in the 1970s.
He could often be seen around his downtown Manhattan neighborhood, wearing a newsboy cap and leather jacket, his camera hanging from a strap around his neck. He posted tens of thousands of photos on Flickr for public view, sometimes under the pseudonym Elisha Cook Jr., a character actor known for his work in 1940s film noir.
In addition to Ms. Ludwig Jansen, Dr. Ludwig is survived by two other children from his first marriage, Pamela Ludwig Dreyfuss and Adam Ludwig, as well as Ms. Akin and their children, Alison Ludwig and Allan Ludwig Jr., and two grandchildren.
Dr. Ludwig’s photographic work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and other institutions. Hundreds of his gravestone photographs and copies of his photos from “Graven Images” are collected at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
It is “an extraordinary work,” the critic Greil Marcus wrote in 1976. “To leaf through this book is to confront a vanished community trying to make sense of itself through art.”
Jeré Longman is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk who writes the occasional sports-related story.
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