Joe Johnson’s Mega Church series
|Missouri-based photographer Joe Johnson takes beautiful shots of mega-churches. We checked in with him and asked him how this project started: ‘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’. There’s an extensive interview with Joe Johnson on the Feature Shoot website.
Tagged: mega churches, North Carolina churches
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