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2025 Annual Conference

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March 06-08, 2025

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In God's House

Robert Knight

Friday, October 24 - 2:40PM to 3:25PM
Clark Theater

For the past two years I have been examining religious communities in central New York, mainly around Utica, a city of 65,000 located along the Erie Canal. I have been looking in particular at how changes in demographics and social life (ranging from immigration patterns to shifting social mores to theological developments) manifest themselves in the physical structure and usage of sacred spaces and in the relationship between these spaces and the urban environment in which they exist. I use large-format 4x5" photographs and single and multichannel videos to explore these changes in hopes of creating greater understanding and sympathy across divergent cultures.

In my project, I'm trying to convey the stories of individual religious groups and the spaces they occupy. Photography isn't terribly good at such narrative demands and thus I've balanced the photographs with video pieces that are better able to convey narrative complexity. It's fortunate that as photographers most of us now have at our fingertips the ability to capture high quality video through our digital cameras. From a practical standpoint this is both a blessing and a curse, as I now try to shoot for two mediums at the same time: making still photographs while capturing video and often separate audio as well. However, beyond its function as a narrative structure in my project, effective use of video seems to be one way that we as lens-based practitioners can differentiate ourselves from the ubiquity of still photography, in which nearly one trillion digital images will reportedly be made in 2014.

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Robert Knight
Robert Knight

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