In God He Trusts

Over the past 30 years, photographer Steven Katzman has documented the lives of Native Americans on a reservation in Wisconsin, prize fighters both famous and obscure, inmates in Oklahoma and Louisiana prisons, youthful offenders in a Florida boot camp and the people of Newtown, an African-American community in Sarasota, Florida, where he lives and teaches at Ringling College of Art & Design. He has also extensively photographed the grisly process of cremation. But it was not until Katzman crossed the line between outside observer and active participant that his work truly came into focus for him.

The occasion for this transition and transformation was Katzman's documentation of charismatic Christian revival meetings, the subject of his new book The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption (powerHouse Books, 2005). The book features 85 black-and-white photographs from among thousands Katzman took between 1999 and 2004. Raw, immediate and passionate, Katzman's pictures capture worshippers in moments of religious ecstasy that range from cries of pain to tears of joy, from sweet surrender to total collapse. Originally drawn to evangelical revivals as spectacle, Katzman unwittingly found himself caught up in a liberating spiritual journey of his own.

"When I crossed over, when I started to have faith. . . to get me to ask God for forgiveness was very, very traumatic," says Katzman. "In both a physical and an emotional sense, it was ugly."

Born into a very prosperous and conservative Jewish family in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1950, Katzman, 54, was blessed with a life of privilege. His father was a successful manufacturer of mobile homes and he grew up with an appreciation for modern art and architecture. His high school graduation present was a two and half month trip to Europe. As a boy, Katzman collected stamps of such value that when he finally sold them he was able to purchase a number of Ansel Adams prints and an automobile and make a 20 percent down payment on a home.

At the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where he graduated with a degree in political science in 1973, Katzman was inspired by James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men to undertake a similar project of his own, marrying his interests in art and social change by photographing the residents of a nearby Oneida Indian reservation.

After graduating from college, Katzman took his photographs to New York and sought an audience with legendary portrait photographer Arnold Newman, who told the young Katzman that he should master the art of the 4 x 5 camera and then return to work as Newman's assistant. Katzman promptly went out and bought a Sinar P, but he never returned to Newman's studio.

"I never started out small. I really had a great place to start," says Katzman, "but I didn't always take advantage of it. I was distracted. It really wasn't until this last project that I became extremely focused in my work."

Part of the distraction in Katzman's life was his struggle against his conservative Jewish upbringing and the expectations that went along with it? that he would marry a nice Jewish girl, produce an heir, perhaps go into the family business. Instead, Katzman fathered a son out of wedlock, married a non-Jewish girl, and became a photographer.

"I was a handful," he admits now.

The underlying tensions in Katzman's life erupted into the open when blood became mixed with business. For a short time, Katzman managed a mobile home park in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Then, in 1977, he and his family opened Image, a photography gallery in Sarasota. A "major disagreement" led Katzman to leave in 1982 to start his own competing gallery.

In 1983, with his first marriage in ruins and his wife in a psychiatric hospital, Katzman sold all of his photographic equipment and abandoned photography for several years. His mature body of work?portraits of boxers, prison inmates, juvenile offenders, and corpses?dates from the 1990s. Between 1993 and 1997, Katzman looked unflinchingly at mortality in a large series of cremation photographs.

"When I was done shooting death," he says, "for a year I didn't shoot at all, not one picture."

Then one day in 1999, Katzman happened to see a Florida newspaper ad urging readers to "Come to the Miracle Tent. Come witness the blind see, the crippled walk, the deaf hear."

"I thought, 'This has got to be truly amazing. I'll probably have an allergic reaction to all the polyester.' But I went."

Initially, Katzman visited and photographed tent revival meetings around Sarasota, but eventually he found his way to the Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola. At first, his access and permission to photograph was somewhat limited, but as he felt himself drawn inexorably toward the passion of forgiveness he found his access expanding and opening.

Skip Cohen, former president of Hasselblad and now president of Rangefinder Publishing, believes the source of the power of Katzman's work is his identification with his subjects.

"He's a student of humanity, of the human spirit," says Cohen. "He's able to document it because he's there. He's not standing on the sidelines. It's one thing to get a photograph; it's another thing to get your subjects to relax and trust you."

Eventually, one of the writhing bodies and contorted faces begging God for forgiveness belonged to Katzman. Though he did not convert to Christianity, he now considers himself a Messianic Jew.

"I have my faith," he says, "something I didn't have before."

Still very much pro-choice and politically progressive, Katzman admits that he never did see the blind see, the deaf hear and the crippled walk.

"But I realized it was I who was blind, I who was deaf, I who was crippled. After that realization, I was totally free."