The Known Unkown

Each image in The Known Unknown is a consideration of self. In this exploration, only fresh air and footsteps are exchanged with the land, with no real direction or goal other than keeping one’s head up. A thin veil obscures the landscape and encroaches onto the sky during each long exposure of the 4×5 film, reminding us that we are never truly still even when resting. The simple act of wandering alone in the woods creates a practice of slowing down and claiming a space: I am here, I belong, I matter. Capturing these moments in time allows us to identify how we are connected to the environment, to others in our lives, and most importantly to ourselves. The repetitive and disorienting nature of the work allows the viewer to consider the cycles in our daily lives. Reflecting on the internal conversation, and how this translates into the actions we take to care for ourselves, is an attempt to map the overwhelming unknown.

Traveler

To travel by land is to own your journey. 

Flying – everything between departure and arrival is fantasy. 

When I travel, I look for visual markers of how decisions made over time in  dealing with the universal problems of survival have shaped societies. I  photograph people in their social environment and use words to express the feelings I had at the moment the image was made, inviting the viewer to join  me in looking into these images, not just at them. Using words and images I  consider what made those fugitive moments special as I search for the timeless  in the temporal.

CITY OF GOD

Like many gateway cities across America, the city of Lynn has an abundance of immigrant faith communities, but they often remain under the radar, and their impact is hidden.   This abundance however debunks several stubborn stereotypes and myths.  One is that gateway cities are only about crime, drugs and gangs (Lynn itself is known throughout New England as the “City of Sin”).  The reality is, if you come to Lynn, you will find that God, faith, and church are also present in the city.  A second myth is that immigrants only bring problems to an area.  Immigrants, in fact, often bring a vitalized faith, a strong emphasis on family, and a desire to bless the city.  A third myth is the secularization thesis prevalent in places like New England.  This thesis portrays New England on the same trajectory as Europe with churches closing and religious faith dying.  Not so in Lynn.

As a pastor myself, serving at Washington Street Baptist Church, a multi-ethnic church in Lynn, I am drawn to better understand, value and celebrate the role of the immigrant church in our cities.   Lynn is filled with people groups from all over the world who bring their faith in God to America as they continue to worship Him in their new land.  But why isn’t this spiritual story told more?  In today’s political climate, many conservatives are fearful and wary of new immigrants.  Progressives have been wary of the church due to past failures of leadership and hypocrisy.   Immigrant churches themselves often remain insular and keep a low profile for justifiable reasons.  But the result is that the role and importance of the immigrant church has been neglected in our culture. The hidden story of the immigrant church must be told to the benefit and advocacy of the immigrant church itself and also for the understanding and appreciation of the wider community.

City of God is the beginning of an ongoing documentary photography project I am undertaking. It is funded through a grant from the Louisville Institute’s Pastoral Study Project and includes an advisory group of faith leaders from Lynn.  Several portfolios are in development including “Immigrant Church” which catalogs the architecture of various congregations in the city and “Evidence of Faith” which documents an everyday, lived faith you can find all around Lynn.   This Atelier 35 project highlights photographs from both portfolios.   As the project unfolds, new photographs will be posted on www.peterbalentine.com/cityofgod each week, along with blog posts containing key learnings, book reviews, organizational spotlights, etc.  You can also follow the project on Instagram or Facebook.

Ju·ve·nil·ia \ jü-və-ˈni-lē-ə \

1 : compositions produced in the artist’s or author’s youth
2 : artistic or literary compositions suited to or designed for the young

JUVENILIA is a series of manually constructed photographs inspired by popular youth culture and romantic notions of coming-of-age. At the intersection of photography, digital media, installation, historic photographic processes, sculpture, and readymades, this series examines how photographs can be constructed to serve as a material for art-making.

With their socio-cultural significance, objects play an essential role in the shaping of our individual and collective identities. JUVENILIA pulls the viewer into a seemingly comedic atmosphere by echoing camp aesthetics and childhood paraphernalia. The more the narrative is revealed, the more dark undertones become visible. A combination of graphic overload and visual bait, each photograph unveils narrative compositions that lie between the comic and the melancholic, the public and the autobiographical.

Exposing the fragmented self, JUVENILIA draws attention to rarely addressed issues of infancy, such as loss, trauma, addiction, sexual alienation, romantic entrapments, early quests for freedom, and the (re)generation of identity. Beyond gloss and sentimentality, this series is a reflection on generational rites of passage that address pivotal moments of early character formation. JUVENILIA presents bittersweet, ephemeral moments of youth that, as quickly as they pass, leave lasting marks on our developing psyches.

Minor Imperfections (2012 – present)

My ongoing photography-based series, Minor Imperfections, reveals the hidden experience of
insidious cycles of my mental illness. I began this project in 2012, working intermittently, until I suffered a major depressive episode in 2020 that renewed my compulsion to create this imagery. To illustrate my struggle, I utilize collage to craft disjointed images of my face that evoke the trials of anxiety and depression. The face is our primary physical identifier, often considered the most reflective of our internal selves.

When I rupture my face into multiple pieces and collage it back together it signifies my attempt to reassemble my identity after a psychological breakdown. I strive for perfection, yet, after this reconstructive surgery, the parts fail to reunify. The resulting images leave fractured seams that illuminate my fragmented relationship with myself. This artwork indicates one of the primary
symptoms of my mental illness— body dysmorphia, the obsession with perceived physical flaws. This distorted relationship with my appearance extends to a painfully disrupted relationship with the world around me.

In both my artwork and psyche, I scrutinize my body and mind. I continuously break, then gather and reassemble pieces of myself. My search for wholeness is an ongoing component of my creative
practice. I invite the viewer into my predicament to cultivate connection, empathy, and collective
healing.

 

Musical Moments  

The current series “Musical Moments” is inspired by the concept of a character  piece: a musical composition that expresses a distinct and defining mood. As  Romanticism swept through the musical world in the 1800s, strict adherence to  compositional form gave way to looser, free-flowing compositions, and the  mood and ideas evoked by the piece became a focal point of many  compositions.

Through a series of photographic composites “Musical Moments” explores how  the essence and sentiment of such musical forms can be transmuted from an  auditory to a visual medium. The series presents four such forms: a caprice, in its  whimsicality and humor; a nocturne, expressive of the mystery of the night; a  serenade, lyric and poetic; and marche funèbre, a funeral march with its  requisite somberness yet nostalgia of a distant and elusive memory. While  compositional rules have changed through the years, the emotional character and mood at the heart of these pieces, which I explore in my work, have  continued to captivate, engage, and inspire listeners through the tests of time.

TREES: SKIN DEEP

After growing up in Brooklyn, I spent a portion of my 20s homesteading in the woods of New Hampshire. At that time, trees were either utilitarian (think, firewood) or romantic (think Walden Pond). Now, living in Boston, I spend lots of time walking through urban woods. I am reconnecting in a deeper way to my earlier experiences with the natural world, in particular the slow, enigmatic, and tenacious energy of trees.

In this project, I’ve focused close in on tree bark. It’s the outer layer and it’s my entry point to a vision of the lives of these common yet unique and alien life forms. Beyond the abstractions of skin-deep colors, textures and shapes, there are stories here to tell, embedded in the tree’s bark, about their lives and their interactions with human life, how they live, how they die.

These images invite us to look closely at details that we might otherwise move passed quickly. We notice the evidence of their slow, relentless accommodation to human and natural interventions and the ways in which they live longer and at a slower pace than we do.

There is unexpected and surprising beauty here, if we attend to it.

Sacred Places & Objects

I am moved by the spirituality resident in Churches.  Churches have historically been places of worship for society.   Many churches designed in the shape of a cross, were built by immigrants to provide a place to meet and worship.  Church architecture, stained glass, interior decorations and religious objects are considered artwork.

I started my sacred places project by documenting the interior of two small chapels in Newport, RI.  One was ornate and maintained and the other was in decline and deterioration.  Both maintained their spirituality.  As I created these images I found that I had a passion to document churches and sacred places in their current state understanding that many of these would not survive.  The current environment is characterized by declining participation in organized religion.  These declines will result in an inability to maintain these sacred places, and many of them will not survive in their current form.

My primary interest is in using the interior of Churches to memorializing the  Architecture; Stained Glass & painted artwork; and sacred objects/icons that represent the spirituality of these sacred places.  I am using modern digital cameras and software to photograph church interiors that are generally dark with inconsistent lighting.

Confluence: Working Rivers of Peterborough, New Hampshire

Peterborough, New Hampshire sits at the confluence of the Contoocook River and Nubanusit Brook. Today, its economy is largely supported through tourism driven by outdoor recreation, sightseeing, shopping, and the arts. The town is promoted as a quaint, rural bastion of simpler living and “Yankee practicality.” This framing of history asks us to visualize an unbroken tradition back to some mental picture of industrious farm families subsisting on the land outside of a Grandma Moses town center. However, for over a century, Peterborough—like many rural New England towns of today—would have been better characterized as a “mill town.”

The influx and eventual departure of manufacturing required the parallel influx and eventual departure of the people who worked in the mills and factories. This largely immigrant workforce is in danger of erasure when we are overly nostalgic about our short-lived agrarian period. These photographs of riverside mill sites of Peterborough stand in testimony to the workers who were brought here by the opportunity those mills offered. Some are vacant, some are built anew, and some still remain with different purpose.

 

A Photographic Quest for Poetic Imagery

In the summer of 2021, I began a strange journey with my photography.  I had been couped up in my home almost the entire year due to a plague that hit our world.  I needed to break out and explore that world again.  So, I set out on a Photographic Quest on the first day of Summer. In this quest, there were many short journeys in and around my home base. This took me on daytrips with my wife, friends and myself.  This photographic quest sent me off exploring in many directions and adventures.  I wrote a journal of thoughts along the way. This Quest had no specific direction or purpose other than an idea to photograph the concept of poetic imagery.

I produced a photographic body of work to base my idea on. This body of work was both straight forward photography and imaginary images. I needed to make them poetic in nature.  “What the hell is poetry”, I began to ask. I knew nothing about poetry. I started to search out the meaning of what makes a poem poetry. I was surprised at what I found out.  Poetry is not a precise definition. It meant many things to many people. I was again lost in my questions of “what makes a poem poetry

I explored my work in as many possible directions as I could. This led me down incredible paths to explore. I could one day sit at a pond, photograph raindrops on leaves, or a fairy in a garden or a man working hard at shoeing a horse. I explored my church where I spent many hours in as a young adult looking for a faith. Or a Boy Scout camp where I spent days as a scout enjoying life.

This Photographic Quest was a great and wonderful adventure for me. A thistle began to grow in my garden.  One day the light was right, the flower began to ripen, and I began an exploration of this plant. It was wonderful to explore and photograph.  These images are my view of this extraordinary flower.

Here lies my real Quest.