Photographing Jesus

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Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography

By Nissan N. Perez
(London, UK: Merrell, 2003) 224 pp., 195 illus., $50.00 (hardcover)

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Photographs speak to us in a way no other medium does. It’s not that they tell us more than a text or painting. It’s that they force us to think, for a minute or two, Yes, that’s the way it was. That’s how it happened.

Of course, we think this because we associate photographs with journalism. Most of the photos we study 022each day are in the newspaper or on TV. They are presented to us as accurate reports of what happened the day before, and we generally accept them as such.

But this was not true in the early days of photography. In the first decades after its invention in the 1820s, photography was seen primarily as a new tool for fine artists to create “paintings.” Portrait artists brought the newfangled cameras into their studios for formal shoots. Impressionist painters, in their efforts to replicate what the eye really saw, created photographic images of waterlily-encrusted ponds and hazy summer landscapes.

In those early days, a few religious artists, too, used the camera to create artistic scenes. In Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography, Israel Museum curator Nissan N. Perez catalogues their work along with several contemporary biblical photographs.

To modern eyes, many of the earliest images appear staged, unrealistic. One of the earliest extant biblical photographs, by American Gabriel Harrison, takes as its subject a figure who often appears in Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child: The Infant Savior Bearing the Cross (photo, above). But in Harrison’s daguerrotype from around 1860, the boy seems too old, the cross too light. The child is obviously an actor playing a part. (Note the suntan line at his wrist.) The staged scene fails today as a photograph, in that it does not meet our expectation for some kind of truth in photography.

Oscar Gustav Reijlander’s Head of St John the Baptist on a Charger (albumen print, c. 1858; a “charger” is a round tray) is equally unbelievable—although perhaps funnier (photo, above); Fred Holland Day’s 1898 Crucifixion is far grimmer (platinum print, below). Born outside Boston, Day imported cedarwood from Lebanon to construct the crosses that appear in his hundreds of crucifixion photos.

Far more successful and beautiful is Gertrud Käsebier’s 1899 The Manger (photogravure) (photogravure, below). Perhaps it is the simplicity of the scene—the timeless image of a mother loving her child—that is so moving.

As soon as the camera came to be recognized as a tool to document events, photographs, including biblical photographs, changed. Most photographers stopped staging biblical scenes and instead looked for biblical allegories in modern life. American Lewis Hine, documenting immigrant life and child labor practices in the U.S. in the early 20th century, found Madonnas at Ellis Island and in New York tenements. Israeli Mischa Kirschner discovered another in a Palestinian refugee camp near Gaza in 1988. Numerous socially and politically motivated photographs depict the modern sufferers—war wounded, refugees, destitute, sick—in the lifeless pose of Jesus descending from the cross. A 1999 photo by Ukrainian Boris Mikhailov shows a young homeless man, stripped of his shirt, being lifted from his bed of snow (chromogenic print, below).

Perez concludes:

Looking at the image of Christ through the interpretations of photographers during the last century and a half almost leads the viewer to discover a new photographic Gospel, in which each artist adds something personal, and renders Christ more human, more real, at eye level with the spectator, even if at times the image on the surface is not to the liking of all.

What is missing in this volume? The awe and mystery of the Gospels. The divinity of Christ. In photographs, Jesus never performs miracles; he never heals the sick or casts out demons. Only once, in a German photo from 1890 (albumen print, above, by H. Korff), does Jesus ascend to heaven. But he looks like an actor pinned high on a stage wall. No, we say when we see the photo, that’s not the way it was. That’s not how it happened.

Revelation: Representations of Christ in Photography By Nissan N. Perez (London, UK: Merrell, 2003) 224 pp., 195 illus., $50.00 (hardcover) 020 Photographs speak to us in a way no other medium does. It’s not that they tell us more than a text or painting. It’s that they force us to think, for a minute or two, Yes, that’s the way it was. That’s how it happened. Of course, we think this because we associate photographs with journalism. Most of the photos we study 022each day are in the newspaper or on TV. They are presented to us as […]