The Revd Bob Mayo explains the reasons behind the images and some of the discoveries he and his team made by producing them.
These six pictures were shot over one week in December as the result of a partnership between a rock photographer, a youth worker and a vicar. Dennis Morris is a world famous photographer, known especially for his iconic images of Bob Marley and other rock groups. Ben Bell has run together youth work and his own interest in photography through his work in Islington over the last 15 years. I am a parish priest in Shepherd’s Bush with a background of research into young people’s spirituality. The three of us worked together with young people from Islington to produce these images, which takes the heart of the Easter story and translates it into the lives of children and young people today.
There are six key events that mark the Easter story. These are Palm Sunday, the Last Supper, Gethsemane, the Trial, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. The six images in this pack mirror back to children and young people how each of these events might be represented in their lives. The images are not an exploration of how young people relate to the Christian story but rather a re-presentation of the events in a contemporary cultural context with which young people are likely to be familiar. The initial thinking behind this came from a research project I was involved in which showed that images can be a wonderful stimulus for open-ended discussion on themes of spirituality and meaning. Images appeal to the imagination of children and young people as well as to their thinking and feeling selves. Images provide space to wonder and to explore, without the tyranny of always being expected to come up with the right answer.
The events of our week together were chaotic and fun. The pictures were shot in a damp and scrappy church hall that had been broken into over the weekend. We brought a red backdrop and spent the first half an hour of the shoot taping it up to the ceiling. The young people had no sense that someone the stature of Dennis Morris was photographing them. On one occasion he was ready to shoot when a young person’s mobile rang. She snatched at the phone, marched off to answer it and left us waiting while she finished the conversation. On our final shoot we waited an hour and a half for the young people to come. Some came, said that they would be back in five minutes and went away again for another half an hour. We ended up doing twenty minutes filming for two and a half hours waiting. Throughout the process there were parallel realities running alongside each other. Dennis was focusing on the images, Ben and I were concentrating on managing the event and the young people were concerned with each other.
Jesus going to his death forlorn and alone is the ultimate example of something seemingly hopeless but actually fabulous. In our small way this is what we experienced during our week together. We were immersed in the Easter story and the process of our taking the photographs began to run parallel to some of the events of Holy Week. The young people came to be photographed largely out of loyalty to Ben but they did not fully understand the significance of what we were trying to achieve. At the Last Supper, I imagine the attitude of the disciples to have been somewhat similar. Jesus would have bemused them; they would have known that something important was going on but not quite sure what it was. We were concerned when we realized that the young people would be coming straight from school, but then the poignancy of the school uniforms in the images cemented in our minds the ordinariness of the disciples as the key players in the drama of Holy Week. Dennis was creating new ways of looking at what would otherwise have been familiar, ordinary and drab. He saw possibilities in the images that would otherwise have been lost. Danny, one of the young people, described the process as “fun and strange”.
The appropriate passage from the Bible, along with questions for the children, is provided on the back of each A4 poster. The Group Leader’s notes are to help you understand what was intended in the making of the image. I commend the results of our week together as a resource to help young people learn the Easter story. All learning lies on a pendulum between self-discovery where we work something out for ourselves, and things taught where we accept something as a given truth. The former comes through our imagination and intuition, and the latter from our consciousness and understanding. These pictures can bring a new reality to the Easter story by appealing to young people’s imagination as well as to their understanding.
The copyright for the Easter 2008 images is held jointly by Dennis Morris, the Diocese of London & CMS. Thanks are due to Tapestry MM for their contribution to the project and also to the young people of St Stephen’s and St Mary’s Islington.
