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| © Steven Katzman |
| “Revival Ministries International, Tampa, FL 2002.” |
Steven Katzman started out wanting to change the world with his photographs, but then he lost his way. Inspired by the compassion of 19th-century muckraking photojournalist Jacob Riis, but slowed down by the meticulous technique of Ansel Adams’s Zone System, Katzman shot portraits of death row prison inmates and juvenile offenders before getting stuck in a series he called, simply, “Death.”
Those images featured careful presentations of dead fetuses, bodies being cremated, and frozen rats. “I’m blow-drying these wet rats, arranging them in a line on a beautiful Italian coffee table, and getting hung up on Zone III,” Katzman recalls. “I felt like I was dying. I happened to look up and see a sunflower in the kitchen, and something made me say to myself, ‘Ignore Zone III and concentrate on the image.’ I rearranged the rats into the shape of a sunflower and broke away from this crippling framework I’d created for myself.”
A few days later, Katzman saw an advertisement in Sarasota, Florida’s Herald Tribune for a Christian revival prayer meeting. Something about its plea to “come and witness the blind see” made him flash back to his roots as a concerned photographer. He decided to go
to the Miracle Tent, as it was being billed, to shoot a photo essay on personal faith and spiritual revival.
Katzman was drawn in by the participants’ ecstasy and pain, the preacher’s laying on of hands, the “throng of lost souls being blinded by His light.” He returned again and again to document Leroy Jenkins’ services in the Miracle Tent. When the tent closed for the year, Katzman was invited by Jenkins to shoot the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida—perhaps the epicenter of Christian American revivalism.
The deeply emotional black-and-white photographs Katzman took of parishioners in both places, as well as of other revivalist congregations around the country and beyond, are assembled in The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption (powerHouse, $50). Shot with a Mamiya 7 camera, a 6x7cm interchangeable-lens rangefinder, on Kodak T-Max 100 and 400 films, they derive their power from both the intensity of, and the photographer’s empathy with, their subjects’ experience. In fact, Katzman himself underwent a personal transformation while shooting the book’s photographs; his testimonial can be found on his Website, stevenkatzmanphotography.com.
One needn’t experience a religious conversion, however, to arrive at the same sense of moral responsibility that Katzman feels—an understanding that being blessed with talent obligates the artist to his subjects. “I used to ask myself, when I was shooting, ‘Does this qualify as a subject?’” says Katzman. “Now I ask myself, ‘Am I being honest with my subject?’ If I believe in the work, then my subjects believe in it, and consequently in themselves. And if you can get people to believe in themselves—well, you can’t measure the value of that.”
Katzman passes that lesson along to his students at Sarasota’s Ringling School of Art and Design, located on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Of course he also teaches photographic technique, including medium format, the view camera, and, yes, the Zone System. Those are skills that Katzman, who is a member of the Lexar Elite photographers group (lexar.com), has put into practice in his many years as a commercial photographer—experience that makes him better able to help his students with their career planning.
Yet even when he’s teaching the craft of photography, he reminds his students that “it isn’t what you know about the technical stuff; it’s your commitment to the image that’s important.” He encourages them to stay “open and vulnerable” when they’re shooting. “I tell them they’re not going to get a strong image without being vulnerable,” says Katzman. “I reveal myself to them because when students see my vulnerability, they learn how to deal with their own.”
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