Getting Religion

For decades, the religion beat at most daily newspapers was considered something of a journalistic backwater. But in recent years, with the rise of evangelical Christianity, an influx of immigrants bringing greater spiritual diversity to the United States, and the war on terror's focus on Islam, religion has become front-page news. And for their part, photojournalists have increasingly found expressions of faith to be attractive subjects.

"We identified a long time ago that this era was big for religion," says Toren Beasley, director of photography for both Newhouse News Service and Religion News Service. "You have to deal with the rise of the religious right, but it's not just Christianity. Islam is huge. Newspapers hadn't been covering that. In the crush to get readers, newspapers realized that religion is a big part of people's lives and that communities are much more diverse now. Newspapers are just catching up to that."

Dozens of newspapers have added so-called "faith and values" sections in recent years, and membership in the Religious Newswriters Foundation has grown from 200 to 470 since 1990. Meanwhile, picture stories focusing on religious subjects are cropping up in newspapers all over the country.

Often, those stories focus on extreme forms of religious practice, such as pentacostal faith healers, or simply show the quotidian rituals and garb of unfamiliar faiths. But the most successful coverage, in Beasley's view, are the stories that avoid such clichés.

"It's really, really important for photographers to focus on how religion impacts daily life, how people live what they believe," says Beasley. "Hands clasped and heads bowed tell us nothing about the application of religion in daily life."



Featuring Faith

Ethan Hyman, a staff photographer at the Raleigh News & Observer, says he has found that, "when you start looking for how religion is influencing people's lives, it's all around you."

Hyman is one of five News & Observer photographers who have contributed to the very successful Acts of Faith photo column that has appeared in that newspaper every Friday since 2002. Acts of Faith has portrayed everything from a traditional bar mitzvah and Catholic health workers serving migrant laborers to a religious marching band, a visit to a Muslim butcher shop and the annual Dive for the Cross in which divers compete to retrieve a cross thrown into the Intercoastal Waterway.

Robert Miller, director of photography at the News & Observer, credits his predecessor Bonnie Jo Mount with proposing Acts of Faith as a way of making what had been a routine church page photo more engaging.

"I hate to say so, but it was superficial," says Miller of the old church page, which typically ran just a picture of a church or temple. "It was kind of filler."

Miller says News & Observer photographers Sher Stoneman and Susana Vera immediately "pushed themselves to go beyond the cliché" before handing Acts of Faith off to Ethan Hyman, Scott Lewis and Lisa Lauck after two years.

"Now Acts of Faith is one of the more rewarding things to do at the paper," says Miller. "It's one of our ongoing stories."

Brian Peterson, staff photographer and photo coach at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, has been producing his own photo column, called "Witness," for two years. While not explicitly about religion, Witness focuses on, in Peterson's words, "things people do that give their lives meaning." Among Peterson's Witness photographs have been overtly religious images, such as an Eastern Orthodox baptism and an elderly church organist, and more broadly spiritual pictures, such as one of a local immigrant theater company that shares two minutes of silence before each rehearsal.

"I needed to do more photography that was more meaningful to me," says Peterson of the genesis of Witness. He didn't think of the column title in a religious context when he began the series, but says, "It does, for me personally, have a spiritual feel."

Elsewhere, Houston freelance photographer Janice Rubin has gotten a lot of play in newspapers all around the country with her photographs of mikvahs, the ritual baths found in Jewish temples.

Rubin, who makes her living doing corporate photography, believes the interest in her mikvah photographs speaks to a hunger in American culture for something more meaningful than consumerism.

"People in our culture are bombarded by commercial issues," she says, "but they can't understand the meaning of life at the mall. People are turning within to look for a deeper sense of purpose in their lives. We are a multicultural society and rituals are one of the ways we define ourselves as unique within a homogeneous culture." (An exhibition of photos from Rubin's Mikvah Project are currently on a six-year tour around North America, and can be viewed at <www.mikvahproject.com>.)

For newspaper staff photographers, feature stories on religion offer some unusual opportunities. Staff photographer Stephen Cannerelli of the Syracuse Post-Standard, for instance, spent the better part of two weeks earlier this year traveling from Hawaii to Rome in order to give local readers a look at the beatification of Blessed Mother Marianne Cope, a Catholic nun from Syracuse who cared for lepers until her death in 1918.

"We do a lot of sports covering Syracuse University teams," says Cannerelli, "but this hits people differently. A lot of people have told me this is the greatest thing we've ever covered."

Cannerelli, a veteran of more than 20 years at the Post-Standard, says, "Not ten years ago the religion beat was just something someone had to do. There would be a couple of stories a week, maybe something on the weekend, but now it's a lot of front-page stories."

John Sale, now director of photography at the Memphis Commercial Appeal, says one of the most pointedly religious features he ever worked on was in 2001 when he was the photography coach at the Spokane Spokesman-Review. The feature was a photographic interpretation of the Ten Commandments by staff photographer Brian Plonka, who won honors for the work from the National Press Photographers Association, American Association of Newspaper Editors, and the Religion Communicators Council.

Plonka, who was POY's Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2002, says he came upon the idea for his Ten Commandments project in a Miami hotel room when an electrical storm knocked out the cable TV. He found himself reading the Gideon Bible and thinking about all the ways we obey and disobey the commandments.

The images he ended up shooting are very subtle, sometimes even obscure, forcing the viewer to think about what he is seeing?a Seattle Mariners fan painted blue to "worship" his team for "Thou shalt have no other god before me," a poached deer for "Thou shalt not steal," a mall Santa Claus for "Thou shalt not bear false witness."

Plonka explains that he made the images intuitively. "Any time I shoot a photo essay, I do no research at all. I just call on life experiences. All of those pictures are a direct reflection on how I was raised. I guess you could say they are the products of the suppressed Catholicism I went through as a kid."

Spokesman-Review editors were very nervous about alienating readers with the project until after it appeared. "There was a concern that if we reported on a religious subject, we could do no right and make everyone angry," says Sale. "But from all the feedback we got, people from all different religious sects were happy just to see the discussion in the newspaper."



Is Faith a Photo Fad?

Donald Winslow, editor of the National Press Photographer Association magazine News Photographer, is a little wary of the newfound interest in religion at newspapers.

"Whether that is a change in America, or a change in the way editors are trying to cultivate and mine readers from a dwindling number of newspaper buyers is yet to be seen," says Winslow. "I have my suspicions, and that is that when newspapers were selling well, you couldn't find stories about it in the newspaper. Readership and sales plummet, and now you're reading about religion all of a sudden."

Whatever is driving newspapers to pay more attention to religion, the growth of space allotted to religion may actually be on the wane, says Debra Mason, executive director of Religion Newswriters Foundation.

"There definitely is no growth in terms of sections and pages and in some areas there have been cutbacks," says Mason. "We worry this will continue because of newspaper research that indicates that readers don't want to read about religion."

Mason refers to a 2001 study by the Readership Institute of the Media Management Center at Northwestern University entitled "The Power to Grow Readership." Sponsored by the Newspaper Association of America and the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the study analyzed the content of 100 American dailies and surveyed 37,000 readers about their reading interests in an attempt to identify content areas that might attract new readers. Religion, lumped together with "parenting" and "relationship" stories ranked low on the reader interest survey.

Still, Religion News Service director of photography Toren Beasley believes that religion stories are hard to avoid as issues of faith and values increasingly infuse the American political agenda.

"This is a very religious time," Beasley says, "a period in history when religion is moving to the forefront very rapidly."

And it is also clear that when photojournalists are able to move beyond "church page" filler to engaging stories of how religion plays out in the everyday lives of people, their work wins both readers and praise.