Saints

"Saints" has become a perfect-bound 8 1/2 X 11 book. If you'd like to buy one, send me a Flickr mail.

Saints

I was drawn to the statues of madonnas and saints in the yards and alleyways of New York’s outer boroughs because they seemed to gather light. This was during the dark winter months of 2006. I was attracted to the statues for other reasons too. Raised a devout Catholic, I had turned violently against the church as a teenager and could still fly into a rage when the subject of priests or Catholic dogma came up. I decided that the statues represented another kind of religious impulse, outside the official church, more ancient. They represented, I decided, a universal human yearning to be magically protected, to be comforted in a hard world. It was easy to make fun of the statues. They were in fact spiritual action figures for grown ups with their bright colors and iconic symbols, and many homeowners had combined them in dizzyingly kitschy displays with everything from garden frogs to Disney cartoon characters. All winter I photographed these displays, along with statues that were fussed-over and revered and those that were being allowed to disintegrate, a vague superstition away from being discarded. Eventually I realized that I was doing so without irony. In the end, like their owners, I found the statues comforting.

38 photos | 1,017 views

items are from between 09 Oct 2005 & 29 May 2006.