“A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.”
The final verse of Phillip Larkin’s “Church Going”
I do my best thinking on long drives. I make my favorite photos in the gaps where I stop to rest, pee, and eat.
I’ve felt compelled to stop at churches for as long as I’ve been going on these drives, especially little country churches. I always try the door to see if the community is of the sort that welcomes a lost soul. I take a little wander in the cemetery, if there is one. I think about what it was like to live and die in this place, how it can feel so foreign and familiar at once.
My father is now, and was throughout my formative years, the pastor of a small, rural church in New Brunswick. These are the kind of places that seem like community strongholds on the outside, but I have learned over time are filled with complicated people and politics inside.
My compulsion to stop and photograph small churches accelerated during the 2020 pandemic. Most of my thinking during that time was coming to terms with my lack of belief in the things the people inside those churches espoused. I started to focus particularly on churches in the process of disappearing.
The communities where these churches have been planted are changing too. Some of them are nearly gone already. Many New Brunswick communities started the pandemic feeling like places where people were coming together, despite the surface solitude. But by a few months in, the cracks underneath were starting to come to the surface. People turned on each other. Political differences were weaponized. The lack of trust in our institutions was accelerating.
These photos are a visual record of what I could see on the surface during long New Brunswick drives over the last decade, and especially during pandemic times. I hope viewers can find their own journey through these photographs. I hope they ponder what is beneath the surface. I hope, however they feel about New Brunswick or wherever they call home, that they can cling to their sense of community and place, even if it disappears on the surface.
I am still on a long drive, though I have turned my back on the faith of my father. I am rooted in and rooting for this place that I call home – New Brunswick. But it is so hard to have faith.
