Na(ï)ve
by Willy Conley
Monastery of Christ in the Desert. Abiquiu, New Mexico. 1988. 35mm sepia-toned, black-and-white photograph.
I have an odd fascination with churches I've visited during my travels. And although I was baptized Lutheran as a baby, I don’t actually go to church, and I’m not religious.
Maybe it all stems from when I was a baby. I was born unable to hear or develop language, yet my parents did not know that until I was three, when they took me to an audiologist who diagnosed me as profoundly deaf.
Virgin Mary’s View. Golden, New Mexico. 2021. Digital color photograph.
When I went to church with my parents as a child, I was in awe of the vaulted ceilings and colorful glass windows. I watched the grandiosity of a man in a white robe high up in front of rows of well-dressed people. He fed a line of them with crackers and sips of his drink, and later, shook their hands.
Behind him stood a sculpture of a poor, thin, bearded man wearing a strange hat while nailed to beams of wood. Maybe this white, imposing man was punished for something when younger, and now life turned out good for him.
Occasionally, my parents put dollar bills in a big metal plate of money passed along their row. People often knelt with a book in hand, eyes closed, and mouths moving. Down the hall, a woman opened a cabinet and pulled a rope up and down — shaking a bell outside on the roof — maybe to scare the birds away from making nests?
These vivid memories are perhaps why I often find myself drawn to unique church architecture and imagery whenever I go on photo trips.
Church in Truchas. New Mexico. 1989. 35mm color transparency.
Willy Conley's published books are: Photographic Memories – Essays, Playlets, and Stories; Plays of Our Own – An Anthology of Scripts by Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Writers, Visual-Gestural Communication, The World of White Water, Listening Through the Bone, The Deaf Heart, and Vignettes of the Deaf Character and Other Plays. Conley is a retired professor/chair of theatre at Gallaudet University (the world’s only liberal arts university for deaf students) in Washington, D.C. Prior to being a professor, Conley used to work as a Registered Biological Photographer at some of the top hospitals in the U.S. To learn more, visit: www.willyconley.com.
