Spitting Image: A Theology of Photography

I preached this sermon on Sunday, March 26, 2017 to the University Church in Yale at Battell Chapel (New Haven, CT). The lectionary included 1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, and John 9:1-41. In this sermon, I reference especially the passages from Ephesians and John, relating them to an art exhibition curated by La Tanya Autry on view the Yale University Art Gallery, Let Us March On: Lee Friedlander and the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.

Nowhere in the Bible is Jesus identified with word and light so emphatically as in the Gospel of John.  Listen to these verses from the beginning of the gospel. Notice how “word” and “light” are repeated: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.... There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.” Jesus as Word and Light.

Several weeks ago when I was reading this passage from the Gospel of John in preparation for today’s sermon, I had already been thinking about photography for quite a while. La Tanya Autry, my colleague at the Yale University Art Gallery, had curated a photography exhibition that had just opened. As I visited the exhibition several times a week, studying the fifty-eight photographs on view, certain words and images from Ephesians and John clung to me as I moved from image to image, pondering photography. These words orbited my head: light and darkness, vision and blindness, Jesus as Word and Light. From Ephesians 5: “For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.” From John 9: The story of a man born blind who, upon meeting Jesus and receiving sight through Jesus’ healing action of spitting saliva on the ground and making mud to rub upon the blind man’s eyes. 

The man was born blind not as a consequence of sin, Jesus told his disciples, but so that God’s works through Jesus’ action might be revealed. The blind man was a human agent through whom Jesus’ divine sonship was made visible. Until the moment the blind man came into contact with Jesus and allowed Jesus to perform the act of healing upon him, the blind man had housed within him the latent potential of being co-revealer of Jesus’ identity as Son of God. Jesus’ act of spitting saliva onto the ground affirmed not only Jesus’ identity as the “spitting” image of God—a mirror image of God’s work of creation in forming Adam out of dust—this act also affirmed the blind man’s own pivotal role as bearer of the good work of revealing Jesus’ divine identity.

When photography was invented in the early decades of the 1800s, it was initially called heliography, “sun writing.” Today’s term, photography, retains some of this early meaning: “writing with light.” To put it in essential terms, photography in its early years was a process by which the sun’s light catalyzed a series of chemical processes on a light-sensitive surface, usually a metal plate, to reveal a spitting image of the primary person, thing, or scene that stood before the camera in which that light-sensitive plate was housed. The metal plate contained a latent image of the photographed subject; only when exposed to light did this image become visible on the surface.

The blind man’s latent role as co-revealer of Jesus as Son of God is made visible through a kind of photographic process—a process of being written upon by the Son (Sun):  The blind man’s own identity as a bearer of God’s image is revealed when he comes into contact with Jesus the Divine Light. Jesus the Divine Word inscribes upon the blind man’s eyes ink made from the dust of Adam and Jesus’ own spit. And when Jesus instructs the blind man to go to the pool of Siloam, the blind man—like a photographic print in a chemical bath in a dark room—soaks in its waters.  When he steps out of the pool, his identity as co-revealer of Jesus’ divine sonship develops. He begins to see himself as somehow cleaved to Jesus, the person and Divine Light that catalyzes this process of transformation.  A photographic image always carries with it its referent—the primary person, object, or scene whose presence the original light-sensitive plate shared and bears an image of. Likewise, the blind man who now has visibility carries within him the original referent—he is the spitting image of the spitting image of God.

As you see, the time I’ve spent studying the fifty-eight photographs in La Tanya Autry’s exhibition has colored my interpretation of today’s lectionary. I tried to write a sermon solely on the lectionary readings, but I can’t get the photography exhibit out of my mind because the subject matter and the individual faces and bodies in those photographs bear such a spiritual call towards aesthetic and moral reckoning. The photographs called me towards articulating a certain theology of photography.

All fifty-eight photographs in the exhibition were taken by a single photographer, Lee Friedlander, on a single day, Friday, May 17th, 1957. That day, over 25,000 African Americans—men, women, and children—gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the National Mall on Washington, D.C., to demonstrate against institutional segregation, voting rights suppression, and the persistence of racial discrimination and hostility in American society and culture.  Just three years earlier, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools in Brown v. Board of Education, and less than two years earlier, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. 

Friedlander wove through and around the crowds, sometimes situated among the audience, sharing their perspective, other times situated on the fringes and peripheries, looking down upon, up at, or obliquely askew towards groups and individuals. In one photograph, there stands Martin Luther King, Jr. at the podium, divided from the other seated speakers by the strong vertical of a flagpole. There appears Rosa Parks, smiling at something or someone just beyond Friedlander’s camera. Several photos convey the heat of that late spring day. A woman, man, or child leaning on the lawn with jacket off, fanning themselves with a hat or a printed program. It’s clear that for many of the attendees, the event was a family affair. Parents and children pose for family photos in front of the gigantic statue of Lincoln, children sit on the laps or at the feet of their elders. There are moments when individuals look directly into Friedlander’s camera, their facial expressions or body postures conveying welcome, curiosity, suspicion, or defiance, pondering perhaps the motives or intentions of Friedlander’s white, male, camera-mediated gaze.

I am particularly struck by a photograph of a young boy, about seven or eight years old, dressed in a Cub Scout uniform complete with cap and badges and tied handkerchief around his neck. He looks defiantly with knitted brows and crossed arms at Friedlander’s camera. Behind the boy, rows of seated adults are facing left, presumably listening to a speaker at the podium. The grownups’ unidirectional gaze towards the left is like a smooth fabric, but the boy’s knitted brows, crossed arms, and tied handkerchief forms a knot in this smooth fabric. His whole body is a knot, and this knot visually suggests the racial tension and awareness of unequal power dynamics between Friedlander’s white, camera-armed presence looking down upon the younger, shorter Cub Scout. In this instance, the social and political meanings offered by the photograph emerge from the photograph’s own aesthetic forms, in the visual details of the situation and not just the situation itself.

In fact, what the photographs in this exhibition underscore for me is how closely aesthetics, politics, and spiritual action are connected. They are different facets of the same gem. First of all, the event was called a “Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom.” The program of events for that day were arranged like a church bulletin, with speeches interspersed with hymns and prayers. Secondly, imagine what the National Mall looked like: a very white place. If you’ve ever been to Washington, D.C. and visited the National Mall, you’ll know what I mean. Marble monuments, limestone buildings in various shades of beige and ecru, concrete stanchions of gray and white. Imagine now what a powerful visual transformation took place that day in 1957, when individuals of a wide array of skin colors and shades filled the space. The alteration in colors was not only visual—it was symbolic and representational. The demonstrators’ presence was a visualization of the call to be made visible, to be included in the national image.

Imagine, too, the wider range of grays between pitch black and bright white that nuanced the visual fields of Friedlander’s black-and-white photographic prints as a consequence of the physical presence and mass gathering in that white space on that day. Friedlander donated the entire series of his Prayer Pilgrimage photos to the Yale University Art Gallery two years ago. This exhibition is the first time they have been publicly shown. You could say that for the first time they are being brought to light. The images in these prints are latent, perhaps belated, but also perhaps right on time. You might find, when studying these images, that while some situations have changed between 1957 and now, some situations seem to have shockingly stayed the same. (Maybe we need more prayer pilgrimages to Washington.)

Through my analogy to photography, I don’t mean to reduce human beings to mere colors or shades that simply decorate or paint a visual field. Rather, I want to make the point that how a space looks, the tones and shades that are included in it, is about more than just aesthetics—it’s about who’s included, who’s represented, who’s seen, who’s made visible, who’s valued, whose lives matter. When you go into a Walgreens or CVS and try to find a shade of foundation that suits your skin tone, whether or not the shade you need is available is certainly about aesthetics, but it also conveys, symbolically and on a level that is more than skin deep, the status of your visibility, inclusion, and valuation in society and the market. Let’s not mince words here about the basis of many unjust policies and exclusionary attitudes, of physical and systemic violence: the basis is, although certainly not limited to, skin color and physical features. The basis is, in other words, aesthetic—yet the meaning is so much more.

I’m going to take a moment now to scan my visual field, to appraise the aesthetics present and visible in this church, in this corner that is part of the privileged space of Yale campus. Who is here? Who is not? Who feels comfortable here? Who does not? What are the institutional or systemic structures that might have determined this? How are we fulfilling God’s spitting image today and here? What are the blind spots, the full spectrum of aesthetic values, we are failing to make visible? Perhaps we are only partially developed, not fully revealed to the light. Perhaps we too, like the blind man and Friedlander’s compositions, need to be more light-sensitive in order to reveal the fullness of the image of God.