| Simone - Fotos
del Pueblo Gallery / 5-c12-iglesia-Leon-h Susan Simone (c) |
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I visited two churches in Chapel Hill, the Iglesia Monte Sinai led by Rev. Victor Leon offering Episcopal services at St. Paul’s A.M.E. church in Carrboro, and La Iglesia Unida led by Rev. Maria Palmer (part of the United Church or Christ based in Cleveland, Ohio) which meets in a building on Cameron Street in Chapel Hill. There are also services at St. Thomas More Catholic church and at many churches outside of town and in Durham, Hillsborough, and Raleigh.
The strongest impression I had as I worked was the feeling of the generation of community. Both services emphasized participation by the congregation and both were followed by a get-together for talk and the exchange of information. In the images, I sought to convey the celebration that is part of the experience of the church service. Sermons are not a time of recrimination. Sermons focus on survival. There is music. There is a restoration of energy for people who work hard, who have undergone dangerous voyages to come here, who may doubt their choices, who may find themselves overwhelmed.
I created the backgrounds for these images by scanning in fabrics woven in Mexico and then applying a stain glass filter in Photoshop. I scanned in the words and images from banners at the Iglesia Unida and extracted them so that they could be super-imposed on the glass background. I scanned tiles and, using Photoshop, selected flowers to paste or “float” across the glass. Without intention, I see that I have created a very elaborate setting for these simple congregations. I have taken the music and made it visual, erasing the ordinary and giving each congregation a rich setting of its own.