If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.
I’ve shot a thousand bodies contorted in a thousand supposed acts of transcendence, and most of it’s performative horseshit, people pretending to feel something because they’ve read the right books and know the right poses. But then you see something that kicks you in the throat, something real, and you remember why you picked up a fucking camera in the first place.
Getting your frame on the cover of Ecumenica: Performance and Religion isn’t some vanity metric, some notch on your belt next to the local arts weekly garbage. This journal actually gives a damn about where the body meets the divine, where sweat and spirit collide in ways that make comfortable academics squirm. They’re not interested in your polite gallery openings or your safe, sanctioned rituals. They want the raw nerve, the genuine article, the places where creativity and faith get tangled up and dangerous.
And Raegan Truax’s Citation, Christ, there it is. The cover shot captures something that most photographers spend their entire lives chasing: that moment when the performer stops performing and becomes a conduit for something bigger, something that makes your hands shake on the shutter release. Truax moves through this durational piece with a grace that’s almost unbearable to witness, her body simultaneously fragile and absolutely indestructible. The beauty isn’t in some conventional aesthetic, it’s in the commitment, the willingness to be completely present and utterly exposed for hours. That kind of endurance isn’t just physical; it’s spiritual warfare, and she executes it with a dignity that’ll haunt your contact sheets forever.
A peer-reviewed journal, Ecumenica regards performance and religion as overlapping and often mutually-constituting categories, preferring no particular form of creative expression, and privileging no particular religious tradition. The journal’s very aim is to consider the variety of modes in which creative and religious impulses might be realized.
Ecumenica’s interdisciplinary premise welcomes all critical approaches to such topics as performance art, theatre, ritual, contemplative and devotional practices, and expressions of community. The journal expects that performance and religion scholarship can add many more topics to this list.