For my final project in photography, I decided to build a narrative around the entropy of religion within society and within the mass consciousness of humanity as a whole. I wanted to explore the way I see that religion and faith have evolved in our society today and the entropic way that it has evolved with us, around the way we ourselves have changed.
For this photo, I wanted to simulate the feeling you would get from looking into a building and looking in on a ritual that you are not a part of and perhaps not meant to see. I chose an ashtray for this because I was thinking about how faith and religion often draw the despairing and lost people to take part in its comforting stories, and in doing so it emulates an ashtray in how it takes in the burnt up, used up people after they have been used. It gives them a place in the world. Often literally, in the form of Churches, Mosques, and Temples. I feel like this represents the way I think church prayer has evolved in many places in wealthy and affluent places. Church prayer is dedicated to the old, the weary and the broken. Used up ashes of people, congregating in one place.
I chose to use this photo because I like how it references the drinking of wine and eating of bread as a Christian ritual of drinking the blood and eating the flesh of Christ to gain eternal life. I wanted to create a view similar to if you were trying to focus on something when drunk and so I reduced the clarity of the image in Adobe Lightroom. I feel that this contributes to the narrative that I am trying to create because a lot of the aforementioned people who are drawn to religion, the used, the broken, might also be this way due to addiction, say, to alcohol. And, because of this, rituals such as the drinking of wine for Christianity may represent a real challenge to these people.
This was originally my favorite picture before I edited the raw version of “Cold God”. I liked this picture because I feel it reflects how a major religious event, that being Christmas, has evolved and changed with our society. I think this example reflects how our faith has grown with us as people the best out of my pieces. The symbol I put in the tree is my own personal Sigil of Lucifer, which I felt appropriate to describe how far this annual holiday has come since its inception.
For this photo I simply got my friend to pose for a picture, but the way he dressed combined with the way I edited the photograph in Adobe Lightroom, I think I created an accurate description of rebellion. Rebellion is a sensitive subject when combined with religion, due to religions often black and white descriptions of good and evil, for example, the fall of Lucifer after his rebellion against God. But rebellion is not an inherently evil thing, just like how fire is not evil. I wanted to relate this photo to how society sees’s rebel’s as either abhorrent or saintly depending on the perspective they see them from.
And if a rebel’s character cannot be discerned without knowing the whole truth, why is it that Lucifer, the first rebel, is always evil? This also makes me think of Prometheus, the character in Greek myth who, in an essential and pivotal act of rebellion against the gods, stole fire from the gods to give to mankind and how Adam and Eve rebelled against gods wishes, seduced by Lucifer, and took the knowledge of good and evil from the tree by biting the apple. In terms of religion, our entire existence is built upon rebellion.
I chose this picture to add to my narrative to represent the things people turn to in place of religion, to fill the void that faith can’t fill for them. This kind of person, in my opinion, makes up the majority of society today. People who have turned away from faith in gods and doctrines to place their trust in machines that they themselves have created and, through that, placing their trust in themselves. However, I think they are simply doing the same thing as the religious percentage of humanity, simply a different way. Whatever we put our faith in, we always end up relying on ourselves. Either by proving ourselves to our deities or by succeeding or failing with technology or whatever we turn to. As much as any god or demon, technology is a god to people in its own right.
This is my final and favorite photograph that I did for my final project. I like it because it reminded me of various versions of the Christian cross as well as the fact that you must look up to see it, due to the fact that the subject is actually a skylight. The way I edited the image in Lightroom to make it look darker and colder makes me think of the way prayers are ultimately unanswered. How asking for something from God is akin to asking the sky for rain. I think that this represents the way people have evolved to expect less in the way of miracles in todays society and how people rely more on themselves.
Leave a comment