Joe Johnson received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art. His work has been featured at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln MA, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester MA, and the Beach Museum at Kansas State University. Joe has participated in exhibitions at Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York, Gallery Kayafas, Boston, Flat File Gallery, Chicago, Photographic Center North West, Seattle, WA, and many others. His work has been reviewed in articles by the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Joe’s work is included in numerous public, private, and corporate collections. In 2008 he received an Individual Creativity grant from the Ohio Arts Council and is a runner up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize. Currently Joe is an Assistant Professor of Photography at the University of Missouri.
What made you decide to start photographing mega churches, and how did you go about obtaining access?
‘In 2006, I moved from Boston to Northwest Ohio to take a full time teaching gig. Until that time I had been photographing from rooftops in some of the largest and densest cities in the country. The Midwest presented me with a challenge. Whatever the characteristics are that identify specific places — that separate one place from another — they are more subdued in the middle of the country. I found Ohio to be eerily anonymous.
‘The mega church phenomenon was no secret to me. Prior, I had attended a few services at a mega church that my mother belongs to in North Carolina. I knew they existed, but was unprepared for the theatrics and the spectacle. Multimedia projectors, pop music, stage lighting, neon, smoke: it was a sensory experience. It was physical and wholly alien from what my idea of organized worship had been. Christian iconography was either stylized into abstract obscurity or altogether absent. The subject had tension. It was visual, topical, and coolly secular. Once I realized that I had relocated to a part of the country where big- box mega churches seemed to sprout forth weekly along the highways of Midwestern ex-urbs, my new project was immediately clear. So I began to search the internet for churches within driving distance that had a weekly attendance of at least 2000 people and I called their public relations representatives. It was easier to gain access than I had expected and once I’d exhausted the possibilities within a two hour drive of my home, I began to organize multi-state driving trips’.
This series is devoid of people. Did you decide not to include portraits from the outset, or did this happen during the editing process?
‘Consistently my projects have some architectural component: urban, vernacular, corporate. Architecture as a medium is quite imposing and I am interested in the built environment as a form of social control. Early in the project, I had kicked around the idea of making portraits of employees, parishioners, or pastors. I discussed the idea with friends and colleagues and even made some portraits here and there. In the end I wondered what the portraits would tell me other than that Evangelical Christians look like you or me. Instead, I focused on the empty spaces and the found still life. Many of the churches in this series are sites for political mobilization. The mechanism, the method of delivering both faith based and political content to believers interested me more and more as the project took shape’.
What criteria did you use when selecting the churches featured in this series?
‘As I mentioned before, I sought the 2000 person weekly attendance mark. It was the most consistent definition of a mega church that I could find. It was also important to me that they were contemporary worship spaces. It seems to me that this project is as much about corporate architecture as it is about church architecture. Outside of attendance, I pretty much would take what I could get, what I could get access to. If I had a two or three day drive ahead of me, online I’d find churches along the way six or eight hours apart and go about creating an itinerary going away and coming back home. When I made an appointment, Id find a hotel room in that town. If I had no response, I’d keep driving’.
Going into this, did you have any preconceptions of what you might find and the direction the project would take?
‘That’s inescapable. While my mother is born again and I sort of know how that informs her life, I was nervous at first when photographing these churches. I’d be lying if told you that I was entirely comfortable standing next to someone who is speaking in tongues. For that matter, I’d be lying if I told you that Evangelical Christians didn’t make me a bit nervous in general.
‘But like any interesting subject, the more I learn about it the more nuanced and complicated it becomes. The mega church photographs simply would not exist without the accommodating staff in each of these churches. On every occasion, I was greeted with warmth and generosity by people who’s lives really centered around their church. I have to remember this fact when I sequence together a group of pictures that to some extent deals with what people value. The resulting pictures never completely conform to whatever my intentions were while photographing. Photographs tend to talk a lot, perhaps because they are so specific. Most often they talk too much and fail to deliver the coherence I require. And at times all too rare, they talk in a way that suggests a reserve of previously unconsidered content’.
Do you still feel compelled to photograph these types of churches or is the project now complete in your mind?
‘I feel like a project is over once I turn around and realize that I’ve been making the same picture over and over again for a few months. I’ve photographed churches of varying sizes in something like fifteen states. I have a core of work that I’m pleased with … for now’.
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