Religious Experience and Photography: The Phenomenology of Photography as Revelatory of the Religious Play of Imagination

Abstract

That there are genuinely religious representations, and that the practice of praying with images involves no confusion of the divine with its representation, are matters firmly established by a phenomenology of imagination such as Edmund Husserl’s. Moreover, such a phenomenological regard can become attentive to the concrete roles played by a viewer’s imagination in his dealings with various sorts of images. I propose to bring these phenomenological insights to show that there is a distinctively religious play of imagination in dealing with religious images. Moreover, I address this question by turning to one kind of representation which Barthes and others have found unsuitable for representing a religious subject, namely, photographic images. While agreeing with some of these reservations, this paper explores some of the ways in which photography may still be found to represent a religious subject, shifting the problem of religious photography from its inherent impossibility to its inadequacy. In doing so, I show that the distinctively religious play of imagination vis-à-vis religious representations cuts a wedge between the depictive and the symbolic, and is rather akin to a metaphorical use of representations.

Keywords

• phenomenology
• religion
• imagination
• image
• photography