Rather than wait until the assignment is upon me, I started my thinking ahead of time for A2 “Photographing the unseen.” A few times of reflection on things that are unseen led to the list below, although I am not pretending that this is exhaustive:
- Emotions
- States of mind
- Spiritual world
- Buried cities
- Dreams
- Hopes and aspirations
- Talent and potential
- The unborn
- The dead
- The wind
- Microscopic life (can be seen, but not by the unaided eye), atomic particles
- Physical health, disease
- Electricity
- Time (past or future)
- Much of the animal world, most of the time
- Things camouflaged or concealed
- Objects in the dark
- Sites that are off-limits
- Works that are banned or censored
- Missing people
- Broken relationships
- Secrets
- Lies
- The ‘disappeared’
- People and names written out of narratives and records, whether deliberately or through forgetfulness / neglect
Along with these thoughts, the title of the assignment itself (“Photographing the unseen”) reminded me strongly of a verse from the New Testament: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Epistle to the Hebrews 11:1). As I thought more about faith being “…the evidence of things not seen” it occurred to me that the writer of this passage is suggesting that the faith held by people points to spiritual realities. The acts and behaviours (not just beliefs) of believers are offered as evidence (not proof) of a particular God.
I wanted to explore this further, because it seems to me that “photographing the unseen” is usually going to involve some kind of proxy for the thing that is absent. Something visible must point to what is not visible. Perhaps this is similar to the way that scientists look at black holes: by definition, black holes do not emit light and are therefore invisible, so we learn about them and gather evidence through observing the effects they have on their surroundings.
This line of thinking holds for the entire list above of things we cannot photograph. We cannot see any of them directly, but we must often infer them by indirect evidence.
In the case of religious faith, we can observe acts, rituals and objects that communicate the confidence of believing communities. And if we gather evidence of the unseen through their surroundings, few signs of faith are more publicly apparent than the sustained investment of time, energy and money in places of worship. A church building does not prove the existence of God, but it does show that the people who build churches have faith in “the unseen.”
This needs more thought yet, but my “photographing the unseen” for A2 may involve the role of churches as signs of faith in our built landscape.
Context and Narrative 
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