Tag: Faith

A2—Reworked

Following the feedback I received from my tutor, I decided to rework both my selection of images for this assignment and the way I presented them.

I decided that a more uniform presentation would avoid breaking the series and allow me to concentrate more closely on particular aspects of the images. I narrowed my set of artefacts to just the books I have in my possession from one line of my family—all of which are related to Christian worship in the Church of England. Furthermore, each book carries an inscription with either the name of my grandfather or my great-grandmother and, in some cases their names in their own handwriting.

I re-shot the assignment with a clearer sense of purpose and did my best to maintain consistency of approach: two shots of each book (closed and opened to the inscription page), no ruler for scale (I decided that the effort to be clinical or ‘archaeological’ was a bit forced), and a plain white background with even lighting. This last consideration has turned out to be more difficult than I thought it might—I’ve done my best to maintain a consistent white balance across the images, but it is not quite perfect.

In sum, the little collection of devotional books gives a glimpse into one aspect of the childhoods of two family members. I do not know if they continued church attendance into adulthood. It’s not a lot on which to build an understanding of a branch of the family: some books that suggest a degree of religious observance in youth, some handwriting, a surname, place names from the island my family left in the mid-1960s. In this sense, I think that the shots respond to the brief for Assignment 2 (photographing the unseen) by being suggestive rather than conclusive about family origins and identity.

Still, the connections are there if I choose to make them, as I see things that continue to be important to me: books, history, faith and place. Other viewers will almost certainly imagine other “unseens” in response to the series.

A2—Initial thoughts

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.