Tag Archives: Church of the Saviour

Central State Hospital

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I was invited to join some friends from the Photo Venture Camera Club this morning on a photo shoot at Central State Hospital, a facility abandoned some years ago.


It was a beautiful morning and we got to Central State early, ahead of the heat.   Central State was occupied, I think, until sometime in the 90s.  The deterioration since then was quite evident.


In addition to walking around taking pictures, I was also going down two other mental paths, one concerned with the stories I have heard at our church, Church of the Saviour, about a mission group within the church that worked to close down this mental hospital.  The other path, distantly connected to the first, concerned the work I did at the Hutchings Psychiatric Center in upstate New York.


The church mission group had as one of its tasks finding and furnishing apartments for hospital residents who were being released to the community.  They also spent time with inpatients.  One inpatient had not spoken in many, many years.  One of the women in our church had children who were profoundly deaf and she could gesture American sign language.  She tried it with this woman and to everyone’s surprise the woman responded.  A beautiful hunch.


This image might represent the confused state of mind that someone who had been living as an inpatient for years might experience on hitting the streets.  This brings up the other path my thoughts were taking.  Many years ago I worked in the research department at Hutchings in Syracuse NY.  One of our jobs was identifying optimal locations for community outreach centers.  At the time Hutchings was charged with maintaining a relatively small inpatient unit and an extensive set of outreach units around the county staffed to provide medication, socialization, group therapy and some individual therapy in the community.  What I saw was that the system worked pretty well although there was significant return to the inpatient unit even with solid community programming.  I don’t know what the community programs are like here in Indianapolis, I would guess not as strong as the Hutchings program.  I’ve met some of the people who would have benefited from that when our church has fed the homeless.  That’s where some of them are now.


When out photographing, I’ve come to think about windows as metaphors for gateways to the human mind.  Windows can give us a hint about what is going on in there.


But often they simply reflect the world back at itself.


If they reflect anything more than the sky.


Abandoned.  The Central State institution is abandoned.  I think many of the people are as well.  One of the people on the shoot is a school speech therapist and as we were walking around this morning, she was describing the plight of of some young people going into the world after high school who stand little chance of anything meaningful in employment.  Somewhat retarded, they aren’t retarded enough to qualify for the help that is provided and they don’t have, and likely will never have, the skills needed to survive in the world.


This is Memorial Day.  My dad and all of my uncles who went into World War II came home safely, some level of miracle.  As we remember those who sacrificed for freedom, let us also remember those who are being passively sacrificed right here at home.


I don’t want to leave the impression that we have pulled the plug on all those people who came out of Central State.  We haven’t.  But care is needed for a lot of people, more care than is being provided.  Let’s remember that too.

Creative encounter

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When events are spread out over time, say one now, another in a week, a third two weeks later and the fourth a month after that, we aren’t as inclined to see them as being connected as we would be if they happen over the course of two hours.

I had been working on an image that came out of the camera club trip to Adams Mill, a trip I wrote about in an earlier post.   This is one of those images that seemed like a good idea at the time but which resisted giving up the image within an image, the image with personal meaning that I hoped was in there somewhere.

This was of a set of ropes hanging by a door.  As shown here, it is essentially what came out of the camera.  The subject – whether the ropes, the door, the colors, the texture or some combination of elements – wasn’t coming clear to me.

Easter morning arrived and I was involved in the usual Sunday morning battle with myself over whether to go to church.  My wife and I belong to a wonderful church with an excellent minister, good friends, a strong bent to community service, and people tolerant of one another’s political and religious beliefs.  But I have never liked going to church and the feeling is getting stronger over the years.  Aside from delivering an elderly lady to church who had (thankfully) lost her driver’s license, I had no special demands on me to go.  I could drop her off and go to Fort Harrison State Park to do some shooting.  Or I could go to church.

I was in my studio reading ‘The Courage to Create’, a book by Rollo May.  He was making the point that any creative act is an encounter, essentially an interaction between an individual and a situation, scene, problem, another individual, etc.   The intensity of the encounter is a major force in deciding the outcome.  The encounter for me would be with a scene and later perhaps with the image as it (and I) matured.  The camera, lens, Photoshop and printer are secondary to the encounter; they provide the means for realizing it, or expressing it.

At this point I felt compelled, driven, pushed,  to stop reading and go back to work on the image in Photoshop.  What was needed now seemed entirely clear – crop it down to show some of the ropes and the door and darken the image to emphasize the light seeping in around the door and through the knothole.  That was it.  The light is what this image is about.

I emailed  the completed image to a friend, not telling her the title.   Here is her response:

‘My initial reaction was curiosity and I liked the warmth of the brown wood and the texture of the rope. A moment later,  I began to assign my own projection of danger to it and realized something bad could be lurking on the other side of that door or within the dark space.’

I then told her the title – ‘Doorway into the Light’ – and she responded:

‘That would definitely work. One could definitely anticipate good things on the light side – and there might be a hellish aspect to the dark door and the heavy or possibly threatening rope.’

I was glad to get that response, it is consistent with what I saw.

I decided to go to church, if only to see if it seemed like a mistake when I was in the church service.  This Easter Sunday the minister did not give the usual sermon about resurrection.  Rather, he talked about the essence of the Christian experience being an encounter with Jesus.  There was that word again.  Encounter.  In my frame of reference that made an encounter with Jesus a creative act.  Reflecting on Jesus’ dialogs with various disciples and other followers, in all the cases I can think of, someone asks a question and Jesus answers in an unexpected way, a creative way.  This encounter with Jesus absolutely requires intensity, giving oneself to it.  Through that intense encounter comes transformation.

It was all coming together.  The encounter with the scene of the ropes, door and light; the resolution of the problem of what the image was to be; understanding better the nature of creativity;  coming to see  encounter with Jesus as critical to the Christian experience.

The image now takes on additional meaning.  It can be frightening to pass through that doorway, not knowing exactly what is on the other side.  Better perhaps, to stay on this side of the door in the comfort of what we know.  But hanging there are those ropes which can bind us to the present, hold us back.  That fear can indeed make the experience of passing through the door, the encounter,  intense.  This gives us a better idea of what May meant when he titled his book ‘The Courage to Create’.  It does take courage to step out and create something new, whether it be a photograph or a spiritual transformation.

I think I’ll give church another chance.

Shooting with an agenda?

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Our little congregation was putting together a cookbook and they needed a picture of the church for it.  Since the  book was going to press on Wednesday, I went up early on Monday hoping to get a nice picture of the sunbathed  front of the church.  Good idea.  The sky was clear and promising.  I set up and got shot after shot over a period of several minutes but  it became clear that the right image was not going to be there.  And the patched parking lot in front wasn’t helping either.  Nothing much of interest as far as the light was concerned and the shot was poorly positioned and composed.

Not very interesting view of Church of the Saviour

Not very interesting view of Church of the Saviour

I’m a fan of Dewitt Jones and one of his dicta at this point would have been “turn around Barry, turn around”!  So I did and that’s when I saw this.

God beam

God beam

The church is situated on eight acres of ground and I’m sure I’ve looked back in this area before but there was never anything of interest or, better, anything interesting I was prepared to see.  It would have been difficult to pass up this shot in any case but there was another reason it was important to me.  In a few weeks I would be preaching while our minister was on vacation and I planned a sermon built around the idea of spirit and seeing.  I was looking for shots that I could use.

Religious language is very symbolic since it deals with the transcendent and unimaginable.  It is interesting to a photographer to see how often light is part of the description of the transcendent – ‘Light of the world’, ‘your word is a lamp unto my feet’, etc.  I had thought early on that a picture of a God beam would be a nice addition to the sermon.  And there it was.

We humans always have an agenda.  My ‘front of the head’ agenda that morning had been to get a good shot of the church.  One item in my ‘back of the head’ agenda, that vast pool of hopes, interests, and yearnings we all carry around, was to get a shot of a God beam.  I’m not going to argue that God gave me a present with that shot, the real gifts to me in the present context are the continued existence of Barry Lively and a growing appreciation of what there is to see.

Christians often quote Matthew 3:2 – ‘Repent for the kingdom of God is near.’  For some that can take on an ominous tone;  it is time to straighten out our lives for the end is coming.  A Bible scholar I know said that a better translation than ‘repent’ would have been ‘turn around.’ ‘Turn around for the kingdom of God is near.’  Indeed it was.  And is.

After working the God beam shot I still had to get a picture of the church.  I moved up the parking lot about 200 feet and shot from the other direction.  It was a better composition but the light was still not what I would want so I used a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) where I did the same shot (on a tripod) three times, overexposing, underexposing and exposing as suggested by the auto exposure feature of the camera.  The shots were combined in software to produce this image.

A better picture of Church of the Saviour

A better picture of Church of the Saviour

The light is still not great but the glow that came from the HDR treatment was nice.  And as it turned out the publisher changed the image from color to black and white.  If I had known that was what they wanted, I might have settled for one of the first shots I took at the original position and converted it to black and white myself.  I’m glad I didn’t know that.  Otherwise there would have been no God beam picture and I might have settled for a poorly composed picture of the church.  If ignorance isn’t really bliss, at least sometimes it is blissful.