An Epiphany

A few minutes ago, I was studying a photograph of a preacher posted to the Photo Schoolhouse Forum and mulling over the preacher project that I have been wanting to do for the last two or three years. While I was looking at the photograph I was also thinking about the attached photograph that I did recently of a friend the Rev. David Bahn in his church St John Lutheran in Cypress, Texas.

I was explaining to David and Jan, who had kindly come along to assist, a shot that I wanted to do and I got an immediate but unusual reaction from both of them—well I thought it was unusual. I wanted to do a photograph of David from the choir loft using a strong low light that would cast a lengthened shadow up the isle. I saw the shadow as symbolic of not only the influence the pastor holds over the members of the congregation but also as a sheltering, taking them under his wing so to speak. But David and Jan saw the shadow as being darkness, ominous, threatening, evil; all fairly popular uses of shadows as symbols. It wasn’t that they did not immediately see the symbolism in the same way that I did that caused me to pause; it was because I had never considered that very popular connotation of a shadow in thinking about the shot.

I did do the shot of David from the choir loft but I did not light it for the shadow.

The photograph posted by Brad Armstrong used light symbolically and in my mind I was contrasting his photograph with the one I had wanted to take. Anyway, in looking at Brad’s photograph tonight it suddenly dawned on me where I had arrived at my symbolism of the shadow. Emerson! If Hattersley didn’t screw my up enough with his Psychology of People Pictures, I had to spend my teenage years reading Emerson. No wonder I do not see the world in a normal way.

“…The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent — put all means into the shade. This all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his thought; — and posterity seem to follow his steps as a procession. A man Caesar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called "the height of Rome;" and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson from his essay, Self Reliance)

I have always read this passage from Emerson to mean that he is using the lengthened shadow as a metaphor symbolic of the influence exhibited by a single man with Luther, Fox and Wesley all associated with the Christian church. I have struggled with my reading of the symbolism of the shadow ever since that night of the photographs. Now that I understand where I got it I might try that shot in the future; maybe not of David but of some preacher. You just never know when you are going to have an epiphany.