The Bible in Photography:
Index, Icon, Tableau, Vision
by Sheona Beaumont
Bloomsbury, 2024
18.9cm x 24.6cm; 266pp; 55 colour illustrations
printed on 80gsm uncoated paper
HB: 978-0-567-70653-9 EB: 978-0-567-70654-6 PB: tbc (July 2025)
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Featuring 20 living photographers, including David LaChapelle, Josef Koudelka, Alinka Echeverría, Andres Serrano, Bettina Rheims, Adi Nes, Garry Fabian Miller, Kieran Dodds, Barbara Kruger, and more.
Also spotlighting historical images such as Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, Francis Frith’s landscape photographs with the first Bible to feature photographic prints, Sister Mary Corita Kent’s instructions for using photography with the Psalms, Thomas Merton’s contemplative still life photographs, and the satirical zine collages of John Heartfield.
What do photographs say about faith? How have the places, people, and ideas of the Bible filtered into photographic vision? Photography was born and grew up in the increasingly secular West, and has become the ubiquitous visual language of our time: we have never invested more in the truth of its images. Yet understandings of how we practice belief in the medium are lacking. This book explores the spiritual depths of visual realism through the lens of biblical imagination. A wealth of photographers, publishing contexts, and theorists such as Roland Barthes and John Berger reveal the religious dimensions of photographic looking – from credulous, to critical, to sceptical. The changing faces of Christendom are seen through an interested lens. The Bible is exposed as contemporary visual theology.
Contents:
Introduction What You See is What You Get
PART 1: Between Word and Image in the Interdisciplinary Landscape
1 Interpretative Positions from Biblical Hermeneutics
2 Interpretative Positions from Art History and Visual Culture Criticism
3 Problems, Paradigms and the CMYK Model
PART 2: The Theology of the Real in Photography and the Bible
4 Index: Landscapes, Witnessing and Documentary Traditions
5 Icon: Identifying with Characters and Portraits
6 Tableau: Storying the World in Scene and Narrative
7 Vision: Shooting the Spiritual and the Apocalyptic
Conclusion Seeing is Believing
Detail images above: Auguste Salzmann The Road to Bethlehem 1854; Lidwien van de Ven Promised Land/Palestine 2005; Roger Fenton Rievaulx Abbey 1854; Dorothea Lange Migrant Mother 1936; Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly I.N.R.I. 1999; David Mach The Money Lenders – Barcelona 2011.