“Potato Processing Plant, WA 2007,” by Christopher Churchill. From the series, American Faith.

I found this series via Conscientious. It’s quite impressive — both for its photography, most of which is excellent, and for its very successful incorporation of audio alongside the images.

Multimedia presentations are of course quite common, and growing more so especially as photographers perceive themselves to be competing for attention with video content. I usually find such inclusion of audio alongside photographs to be at best distracting, and at worst to significantly undermine the impact of the photography.

This is one of the few really notable exceptions. The short segments of spiritual music and interviews are well-edited, and despite being straightforward in content, seem to share a certain allusive quality with Churchill’s photographs, which are very straight in style and mostly head-on in composition but which — when taken as a sequence — seem to be gently circumnavigating the question of faith rather than confronting it.

I come away from it feeling that I understand a little more, instead of knowing a little more, which I think is a hallmark of the best contemporary documentary photography. (After all, most Americans today can choose to know as much or as little about each other as they like, with fairly minimal effort.)

I find the subject matter particularly appealing, since religion has always been a source of fascination for me. And I think Churchill’s approach to it, which is very diverse without having anything of platitude or generalization about it, is quite fitting to the subject.

But at the same time, because it is oriented toward the cultural experience of religion in America, as opposed to the theological or sociological aspects of faith, I think it should appeal to anyone with a photographic interest in America and Americana.