Abstract
This article reflects on the experience and outcome of a collaboration between a photographer, a geographer and six senior citizens from six different faith communities in West London. In 2012 this group collaborated to produce an exhibition ‘Faith in Suburbia: a shared photographic journey’ which was exhibited at a local history museum, at University College London and at the participating places of worship. Drawing on the photographic approach developed by Liz Hingley for her work ‘Under gods: stories for Soho Road’, the participants sought to capture the everyday life and meaning of each other’s places of worship.
Introduction
This paper discusses a collaborative photographic exhibition ‘Faith in Suburbia: a shared photographic journey’ which was the outcome of a project between myself, a geographer, a photographer, Liz Hingley and six senior citizens from different places of worship in West London. This project was conceived as a means to engage local communities with my ongoing research on suburban faith communities. 1 It was also hoped that the project would be a catalyst to open up spaces of inter-faith dialogue in West Ealing and Hanwell, where the research had been undertaken. 2 The methodology for the photography project drew upon Liz’s previous practice working on community projects at museums and galleries alongside showings of her own exhibition Under Gods: Stories from the Soho Road. 3 Participants were introduced to Liz’s work and to her visual practice as a photographer and then invited to be photographers themselves. However, unlike Liz’s previous projects, with visually literate teenagers, we recruited senior citizens as participants. Working with older people was appealing because of the oral histories they were able to share with us about their places of worship, and because we hoped that older people in different faith communities would act as catalysts for inter-faith dialogue in different ways from younger people. We recruited participants from six different local religious communities, Our Lady and St Joseph Catholic Church, St Thomas the Apostle Church (an Anglican Church), West London Islamic Centre, the London Sikh Centre, Ealing Liberal Synagogue and Sri Kanaga Thurkkai Amman Hindu Temple, a predominantly Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu temple. In this paper I provide a commentary, alongside some of the images taken for the exhibition, about the process of undertaking the project and the images taken by the participants. I conclude by reflecting on what I learned from this collaborative research project and how it is shaping my future research practice.
Photography in practice
With one exception the participants had not met each other before. We arranged a first group meeting at which we introduced the project. Our minimum expectation was that each person would visit one place of worship other than their own to take photographs, yet all the participants enthusiastically volunteered to visit everywhere. We thus arranged visits to each place of worship together at which participants took photographs. They then met together to review all their photographs (at this point we had hundreds!) and to select which photographs would be used in our exhibitions.
Liz stressed at the beginning of the process that she was teaching participants to be photographers, a way of looking which was open to all. She explained how she approached new assignments, getting to know a place or an issue, and then seeking to document visually, to ‘tell a story’. She encouraged the participants to think about a narrative for their pictures urging them to explore these unfamiliar places of worship through the camera lens. Initially participants were very unconfident in their abilities, as one remarked ‘my photos are always blurred, my daughter laughs that I cannot take photographs’. They wanted Liz to take photographs for them and sought reassurance that they were doing it correctly. However, as time progressed they became much more confident, reflected in their enthusiasm to take more and more photographs. When we met together to review the photographs participants were initially amazed that these were the photographs they had taken since: ‘they look so good’.
Participants worked together to choose a set of photographs for each of the six places of worship which were then curated by Liz into a series of ‘faith banners’. Banners were chosen to evoke the use of flags or banners in many different faith traditions. We also hoped that the banners would make the exhibition more mobile, so that it could be exhibited in a range of different local places, including all the participating places of worship. The exhibition opened in UCL in December 2012. Between February and June 2013 it was exhibited at the Gunnersbury Park Museum (local history museum for Ealing and Hounslow). 4 From September 2013 it will tour the six participating places of worship and we hope that different inter-faith activities will be organized alongside these exhibitions.
Faith in Suburbia: the images
Discussions about which photographs should be selected for the exhibition gave a valuable insight into how the participants had approached the project. In embracing the opportunity to experience other places of worship some sought to find points of connections between other faiths and their own. Thus, Eileen and Angie found in the Hindu temple, candles and lights which echoed the significance of candles in their own Christian churches. Muslim elder, Usmani, photographed books (including hymn books) at the churches, synagogue and mosque emphasizing that places of worship were not themselves important only ‘the word’.
In other cases, participants sought to learn about the key tenets of different faiths and made sure these were represented in their photographs – thus photographs of the kirpan (sacred swords) were selected for inclusion on the banner for the Sikh temple.
The exhibition at UCL, South Cloisters (top) and at Gunnersbury Park Museum (below).
The most striking aspect of the photography selection was a focus on the everyday, lived, material practices of these suburban places of worship. In the mosque, for example, Eileen took a series of photographs of the graffitied desks where children do their Quran practice, while another participant included a handwritten notice in the prayer hall. Other photographs which were included were a row of shalwar kameez on pegs, and a colourful pile of rolled up prayer mats. These images conveyed a sense of the vitality of the spiritual life of this busy mosque, which is belied by its ugly and mundane exterior, housed in a converted office block. In contrast, on our visit to the place of worship which has arguably the greatest architectural merit, the Anglican church of St Thomas the Apostle, 5 participants chose not to take photographs of the spectacular reredos or the Eric Gill sculptures, but instead concentrated on a series of photographs of the hand stitched kneelers which depict local landmarks and even former vicars. In selecting pictures of the reverse of the kneelers, where the donor was named, a tangible connection was made both with present and former church goers and with the embodied labours and material practices of members of the congregation. Such connections were also evident in photographs of shoes outside the mosque, and in the Hindu and Sikh temples or the book listing the rota for the altar servers at St Joseph’s church. In the synagogue, a photograph selected by everyone was the memorial board of leaves where deceased members of the community are commemorated.
Participant photographs.
Participant photographs.
Participant photographs.
Faith in Suburbia: reflections
The ‘Faith in Suburbia’ exhibition has gained an appreciative audience. Response cards from Gunnersbury Park Museum and the guest book at UCL record favourable comments. 6 Viewers praised the exhibition for its celebration of multicultural faiths in Ealing: ‘Beautiful. Let us continue to celebrate diversity in unity, respecting and praying with and for each other’; and expressed surprise about the diversity of places of worship in their locality: ‘Fascinating to see inside places of worship that I know so little about and could not enter without special permission, I presume.’ Such comments offer possibilities for the kinds of interfaith dialogue which we hope the exhibition will continue to provoke as it returns to the participating places of worship.
Here I want to reflect further on what the collaboration offered for the practising of cultural geographies. Unlike many projects by cultural geographers, this did not begin with a specific research question which might be addressed with a visual methodology, although it clearly benefitted from this work. 7 Instead, it was an experiment in learning about visual practice from a photographer who shared similar research interests. By engaging participants as photographers it enabled them to open up spaces of dialogue as they explored both their own and others’ places of worship in new ways. Rather than stilted conversations about inter-faith relations, participants had a shared project and were able to use their role as photographers to initiate conversations and sometimes transgress the usual spatial boundaries of religious buildings. The participants commented on how some of them had seen their own places of worship differently – looking in new directions or prompted to think about why certain objects were contained there. While there were moments of tension or uncomfortableness when differences of belief or practice were discussed, the shared endeavour of the photography project provided both a powerful unifying force and a means to engage with those differences, for example in choices made about photographs taken or selected for exhibition. The participants were unanimous in the value of the project, as Mr Ramachandran commented: ‘Visiting the mosque and the Sikh temple and other places of worship has opened my eyes . . . it has broadened my mind in many ways. If other people did this it could bring the world together in a small way or even a big way.’
Participant photographs.
For me, the practice of the project enabled me to think of new ways of seeing my own research object. Elizabeth Edwards 8 suggests Liz’s photographs in ‘Under gods’ signal ‘an anthropological turn’ with their focus on the material expression of spiritual life so that the ordinary, mundane ‘spaces of the banal’ are transformed into ‘spaces of feeling’. The photographs taken and selected by the participants convey the significance of the practices of the faithful in their suburban locality. While the congregational spaces were a starting point for the project, the participants chose to convey for the most part not the architectural spaces of religious worship, but something of their meaning as places of spiritual life and communal belonging for themselves and others. Of course the project was not an unmediated experience, shaped both by our staging of this encounter of suburban faiths for the participants and by Liz’s photographic practice which focuses on the everyday details of multicultural religious lives.
The photography project has also shaped future directions for my wider research interests in the intersections of faith, migration and suburban change. As I have previously argued, engaging with the significance and evidence of faith identities and faith practices in suburbia, both in the past and in the present, interrupts straightforward narratives of suburbanization and secular modernity. 9 Tracing the presence of suburban faith communities, particularly those of transnational migrant backgrounds, uncovers a more extroverted, inter-connected and diverse suburban landscape than that often caricatured in popular culture. The diversity of faith expression in the built environment, and particularly evidence of both architectural innovation and improvisation was one important way to develop this argument. However, the photography project provoked an engagement beyond the foundation and fabric of congregational spaces, to an exploration of the importance of everyday material cultures and lived religious expression for members of suburban faith communities. The photographs taken by the participants suggest, in their ordinariness, the recent validation of mainstream suburban cultures. 10 However, they also invite greater analysis. A contemporary shift in religious studies towards the vernacular, points to the significance of domestic and material cultures in understanding faith identity and practice. 11 Paying attention to the ways in which ‘ordinary’ faith lives are lived in ‘everyday’ suburban spaces thus opens up important ways to both reconfigure suburban geographies and rematerialize geographies of religion.
Footnotes
Funding
The photography project was funded by a Beacon Bursary for Public Engagement from University College London. Liz Hingley was funded by the Leverhulme Trust as an artist in residence at the Migration Research Unit, Department of Geography, University Collge London in 2013.