In Showing Faith, the well-known artist Laurence Salzmann (born Philadelphia, 1944) examines faith traditions across time and culture, culled from his photographic archive of some six decades. The exhibition focuses on celebrations that Salzmann has witnessed as a participant-observer, following his training in visual anthropology at Temple University. Salzmann began to make "faith" photographs at age 17, of Easter observances in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, by candlelight and the African American woman who proudly display their church bonnets on Easter Street at the church on the corner of Baring Street where he lives. Presented here for the first time, these photographs possess great resonance, and anticipate the arc of Salzmann’s subsequent work—his search for the specific and universal truths that a keen-eyed, keen-minded photographer is poised to receive.

—Jason Francisco

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FYI: The photographs in this exhibition are drawn from my archives, representing close to sixty years of a life in photography. Many of the photographs look into faith from a social perspective—how people of different cultures outwardly display faith ritually—and others of the photographs are abstract or allegorical considerations. Why this variation? Like trust or dignity or wonder, faith is, of course, ultimately an inner phenomenon—strictly speaking, it has never been photographed. The best I can do in pictures is to provoke an imagination of it. It seems to me also an open question how we should distinguish between "true" and "false" objects of faith. We use this word, after all, to describe both tender religious devotion and hateful ideological fanaticism. Again, my hope is to prompt reflection. If you are so moved, I encourage you to write your thoughts, and add them to the public exploration of this spiritual and also worldly topic.

—Laurence Salzmann

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