Redeeming Time: Photography as Ritual
(I am indebted to James K.A. Smith and his Cultural Liturgies monograph series (Vols. 1-3, Baker Academic) on which this project statement is largely based.)
My photographic practice aims to engage with the following themes:
Photography as a practice or ritual of genuine perception is a way to engage in a discourse on the “social imaginary” that modern consumerist culture embodies. Photographic practice as a ritual of genuine perception aims at understanding what is (or should be) “ultimate,” the object of our love or desire in our modern culture. In this respect, the practice of photography is counter-formative in relation to the object (telos) of desire which consumerist culture embodies, which is material consumption.
As a deliberated act of genuine perception, the ritual of photography enters urban spaces in order to: (i) observe the “social imaginary” at work which embodies the consumer ethos; and (ii) re-capture a sense of “higher time” as the ordering principal for community and culture, through which urban spaces can be redeemed from the deformative effects of consumerism.
The practice of photography as ritual perceives material creation as “divine gift” to be appropriated justly. As an act of genuine observation and perception, photography works as an extension of the divine call to bear the imago Dei in culture through the act of image-making: (i) in Remembrance of the past, which is a “sacramental” act, while reflecting on tradition, proclaims that what presently is (in consumer culture), is not; and (ii) in Expectancy of the future that proclaims a just society yet to come.
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