Temples 2026, part 1

In 2024 I said I was done with this project. I made the caveat that I would almost certainly do more in the future, but I didn’t anticipate that time would come in only 18-ish months. A lot of things have changed in my life in those 18 months, and after a trial run in January I saw enough change in the images to pick it back up.

Temples was an explicitly religious project. It came out of a time in which I was struggling with the religious beliefs of my childhood as they ran up against my lived experience. With guidance from a photography professor and mentor, I worked to channel my unconscious through photography. That semester I went through an average of 2.5 rolls of film a week photographing a rock wall, while trying to figure out what I could see in the photos. It was a terrible portfolio, but I earned an A for the class and left a changed person.

Over the next 5 years I would pick up “rock wall photography” periodically, but wasn’t in the right place to pour myself into it. In 2018 I came back to it as I was returning to a zazen meditation practice and studying various strains of European esotericism. This photo series was the perfect companion to those introspective activities and opened my eyes to deeper layers of work.

’23/’24 as a sea change in my life and I found myself clinging to old work and photo projects as a way of keeping a foot in the illusion of a stable past. I also found that the workings of those religious/spiritual pursuits had born fruit that I didn’t understand and felt alien to me. So, I decided to leave Temples behind to focus on assimilating to a new way of being and radically different self=perception.

In January I felt myself drawn back to the works of the early Gnostic Christians and the contemporary Jungian-inspired interpretations of their surviving works (I’m a librarian, that is just a peril of the job). As I spent time re-reading early Christian apocrypha, I found myself seeing the world in a way I hadn’t since leaving Temples behind. I had lost something, a sense of the divine or cosmic profundity. These photos re part of my process of trying to re-connect to this way of seeing/way of being.