Photographs and Spiritual Atmospheres

Abstract

This wide-ranging essay considers how photographs convey and condition understandings of spiritual space. Photographs have the potential to penetrate more deeply into spiritual experience, to shape ideas about it, and to take people to places they might not otherwise go. Photographic representations may reflect and frame numentectonic (spiritual-architectural) interiors for many people even more so than first-hand experience. Complicating the question of representation, all architectural settings possess atmospheres (referred to by some researchers as ambiences), and these atmospheres are only sometimes spiritual. Spiritual atmosphere is one variety of atmosphere, and to be seen it must be represented and named. A photograph can record atmospheres on the surface of things, capture the spirit of interior space, whether religious or secular, suggest spiritual worlds, and reveal human desire to make contact with those worlds. The history of photography suggests several categories and kinds of photographs as significant touch points in this analysis. Received and ever-evolving cultural understandings further mediate the production and reception of photography. Understanding photography's rhetorics, techniques, media, and settings helps clarify the relationship between atmospheres, interior architecture, and spirituality.