FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
The powerHouse Gallery is pleased to announce the January 2006 exhibition
The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption
by Steven Katzman
Opening January 12, 2006
Press Preview: 5:00–6:00 p.m.
Reception and Book Signing: 6:00–8:00 p.m.
The powerHouse Gallery
68 Charlton Street, New York
For more information, please call 212-604-9074
* Exhibition continues through February 11 *
Preview the Exhibition
“[Katzman’s photographs] are as striking and powerful as anything brought back from a Vodoun ceremony in Haiti, or a primitivist church in Sicily. Yet they make no pretense of the documentarian’s ethnological distance; they’re snapped right there in the midst of the action—in the center of the mosh pit, let’s say—and convey a raw, uncensored passion clearly indicating that the photographer himself has felt something of the experience that has swept these people up.”
—New York Press
Responding with intrigue to a newspaper ad that pleaded, “Come to the Miracle Tent. Come witness the blind see, the crippled walk, the deaf hear,” photographer Steven Katzman, raised a conservative Jew, began photographing Christian revivals around his hometown of Sarasota, Florida. Katzman was then invited to visit the revival center of Christian America—the Brownsville Assembly of God, in Pensacola. There, Katzman found a pious evangelical community where God’s presence is constantly witnessed in the immeasurable force of the congregation’s expressions of religious ecstasy: the laying of hands, the screams and tears of joy and anguish and love as men and women are purged of suffering and sin. The congregation would rise to the point of collapse, lamenting and praying for those less fortunate in the world, being healed by the ever-present love of the faithful and the Lord. As Katzman peered through the lens of his camera, he also heard the desperate calls of the preacher: “Faith has no religion! Do I hear an Amen?” Katzman found what no one had expected—his faith.
With sumptuous black-and-white photographs that recall the religious fervor of El Greco and the anguish of Francis Bacon, The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption takes us inside evangelical meetings across the world and bears witness to the driving emotional faith of Christian revival, where emotion and love pours from the eyes and mouths of the faithful, praying and thanking the Lord.
“Getting ‘inside the velvet rope’ is photographer Katzman’s phrase for gaining access to Christina revival services in Florida, Brazil, and Mozambique, where he shot worshippers in the throes of the most extreme emotional states. His stunning intimate black-and-white images…show believers sobbing, drooling, and falling to the ground as they are wracked with spasms of joy. A freak show in the tradition of Diane Arbus? Katzman makes it impossible to see it that way when he declares that he himself found God in the course of producing this [work]….It is to Katzman’s credit as an artist that what he has produced, far from being a piece of propaganda, is a document that will astonish and move open-minded people on both sides of that velvet rope.”
—Publishers Weekly
Steven Katzman, a self-taught photographer, has received grants from Eastman Kodak, Ilford, and Polaroid, to name a few, and was awarded a Gold ADDY Award for his work. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester; the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation, Göteborg, Sweden; the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia; and the BBC Archives, London. For further work by Steven Katzman, visit www.stevenkatzmanphotography.com. Katzman lives in Sarasota, Florida.
High-res scans to your specification are available upon request. Mandatory credit line: from THE FACE OF FORGIVENESS: SALVATION AND REDEMPTION: Photographs by Steven Katzman, courtesy of The powerHouse Gallery.
For more information, please contact Sara Rosen, Publicity Director
powerHouse Books, 68 Charlton Street, New York, NY 10014
Tel: 212-604-9074 x105, fax: 212-366-5247, email: sara@powerHouseBooks.com
