The Weight of a Place

A Friday Photo Adventure in Jemez Springs, New Mexico

On Friday, we jumped in the car and headed toward Jemez Springs, New Mexico. The mission was simple: enjoy the day, explore a little, and bring home some photographs.

The first thing that caught my attention was the modern tower of Mary, Mother of Priests Catholic Church. There was something about its presence against the surrounding mountains that made me want to stop.

So we did.

I have a routine when I encounter a place that interests me. I don't immediately start taking photographs. I stand for a while. I look. I try to take in the surroundings and get a feel for the place. I let the scene settle in.

Eventually, I start seeing photographs.

Then I walk. I look up, look down, move closer, step back, and explore with open eyes. Sometimes the photograph I end up making has very little resemblance to the first thing that caught my attention.

I found myself drawn to its scale. Standing close to it, looking upward, the structure seemed to take on an entirely different presence. The narrow vertical window, the stonework, the repeating lines and shapes. Each perspective offered another way to experience the building.

Scale has always stirred something emotional in me. Perhaps it's the feeling of being small in the presence of something monumental. Perhaps it's the relationship between human construction and the landscape that surrounds it. Whatever it is, I kept moving closer.

I usually will take a few shots of the same image because I know I will want to process them in a couple of different finishes. I almost always want to experiment with both B&W and color. This is one of the things I love about photography. The photograph doesn't necessarily finish its journey when the shutter closes. Processing gives us another opportunity to interpret what was seen.

The warmer tones brought out the earthiness of the stone and gave the building a certain warmth. The B&W treatments removed some of that warmth, emphasizing texture, geometry, and shadow. One image became almost austere. Another, with the sun behind the tower, became a silhouette against a glowing sky.

There were photographs of ironwork, stained glass, and the beautiful details that reveal themselves when you stop looking at a building as a whole and begin looking at its parts. Even the windows offered their own compositions, framing the mountains beyond them.

I felt a certain sadness about the place. I wouldn't have known how to explain it at the time. It was simply an impression I carried while photographing. Later, while researching the church and its history, I learned about the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic religious order whose ministry in Jemez Springs included providing a place for priests experiencing personal difficulties and troubles.

Here was a place associated with people who, in their own lives, were accustomed to being the ones others turned to for guidance, comfort, and help. Yet they, too, had troubles of their own. There is something worth considering in that contradiction. The people who hold space for the struggles of others are not somehow exempt from having their own.

I had photographed the building before I knew its history. When I learned what brought people there, the photographs seemed to hold a different kind of silence.

We went out for a day of exploring and came home with photographs, a little history, and a reminder of why I love these adventures.