I was walking down the street when a youngish man approached and offered a piece of paper. You never know what you’re going to get when a stranger offers you a piece of paper. It could be a notice about a closing sale. It could be a rant about how Covid is a psyop mind control experiment. Or, as in this case, it could be a pamphlet promising eternal life with an old geezer in the sky above if only I surrender myself to the path laid down by a bronze age rabbi.
There are any number of reasons why I might find contemporary proselytism offensive. Chief among them is that Christian proselytism is intimately tied to a long history of Western colonialism and has been used to rationalize the exploitation of both people and resources. In my estimation, it hasn’t even begun to atone for its many sins, and will never begin that process until it allows a measure of humility to enter into its teachings. I receive the strident certainty of its tone as confirmation that it is deluded.
But in this instance, I didn’t even make it to that primary concern. I was too distracted by two grammatical errors. To my way of thinking, the function of grammar is a lot like the function of religion: it brings order to chaos; it makes our world more meaningful. A religious tract with grammatical errors is like a book of laws for criminals. It embraces a contradiction that not even faith can overcome.
I confess that I tend to take the same approach to the world when I have a camera in hand. I choose subjects and frame photographs and gravitate towards narratives that reinforce a world view in which order triumphs over chaos. In the distance, the world may swallow itself in fog. But here, right here, I see the world with clarity and that reassures me. Like the proselyte on the street corner, I want to share my view of the world with others. My photos may not have the same heft as a passage of scripture, but my aims are the same. More troubling is the fact that when I insist you look at the world exactly as I have looked at the world, I am replicating the colonizing tendencies of my proselytizing brothers and sisters.
Maybe my photographs would benefit from more chaos.
