Contemporary sacred photography: the language of silence

Sacred does not mean religious

The word "sacred" today either frightens or bores. It frightens because it evokes a code (iconography) that art history has used up: halos, crosses, lilies, open books. It bores because it seems to belong to a finished world, where any "sacred" image has already been made better a thousand years ago.

But the sacred is not the religious. The sacred is the quality of suspension that certain images, certain gestures, certain faces have independently of iconography. A woman praying in Bologna in 2025 and a 15th-century Madonna share something that is not the dress, not the veil, not the rosary: it is the way time stops around the face.

The face as threshold

In contemporary sacred photography the face is the load-bearing structure. Not the face as portrait (it is not about restoring likeness) but the face as threshold. The face, especially eyes closed or half-closed, is the most powerful image of interiority that photography has ever produced.

To work on the face means to work on the absence of the returning gaze. A subject who does not look at us is a subject who allows us to look for a long time. All sacred painting learned this before photography: Beato Angelico’s angels never look you in the eye.

Silence is a technical choice

Silence in photography is not just an atmosphere. It is a series of technical decisions.

To eliminate non-essential detail: a wide black field, behind a single-lit face, is a choice that erases the world. Working with a single light source means eliminating competing shadows, simplifying the scene into a geometry of light and dark very close to baroque religious painting.

Working in black and white means subtracting colour (which is always, even when dark, a form of noise. Colour tells where we are. Black and white tells only what we are.

The light that precedes language

There is a quality of light that, when it enters a photograph, suspends discourse. It is a light that does not illuminate: it reveals. It never comes from above like daylight) it comes from the side, slightly from below, like a candle on a table.

Technically it is a low-angle light, small source, with wide fall-off into shadow. In painting it is the light of Caravaggio, Latour, the Spanish still-life painters of the 17th century. In photography it is the light you work with when you want an image not to be seen, but to be listened to.

The practice of removal

All contemporary sacred photography that works is based on the same practice: removal. Removing from the frame every element that is not necessary; removing from the subject every gesture that is not inevitable; removing from post-production every effect that does not serve.

It is a difficult practice because it goes against everything digital photography encourages: add detail, raise dynamic range, recover shadows, enhance micro-contrast. A sacred photograph made with HDR is a contradiction in terms.

The works that taught me

Three references I keep in mind.

The late portraits of Mario Giacomelli, where the seminarians’ faces are black smudges on overexposed whites (it looks like a mistake, but it is exactly how a face can step out of its identity.

The still lifes of Josef Sudek, photographed from the same window sill for forty years: a practice that teaches that the sacred is not where you go, it is how many times you return to the same place, looking at it for real.

The bodies by Sally Mann in the American South, where 17th-century sacred painting meets 20th-century photography and you understand that it had never been a finished genre.

What I look for when I work

When I work on an image in this register, I look for one thing only: the suspension of time. I know I have arrived when, looking at the print for the tenth time, I can no longer say how long ago it was made. It is the moment when the image stops being a photograph and begins to be) even today, even outside a church, a small, patient form of silence.