Jackie Nickerson's photographs in Irish religious communities offer an insight into a normally closed world, and an intimate picture of contemporary religious life, writes Aidan Dunne
The photographs in Jackie Nickerson's exhibition, Faith, at Dublin's Paul Kane Gallery are excerpted from a much larger project. Over a period of several years, Nickerson photographed individuals in Irish religious communities and documented the settings within which they work, live and pray. The resultant body of photographs is a remarkable insight into a normally closed world, and an intimate picture of the reality of religious life in contemporary Ireland.
Next year, more than 100 of her pictures will be published in book form by SteidlMACK, one of the world's leading art and photographic publishers, and the work will also be exhibited in New York.
Faith may sound like a photojournalistic project, but it isn't, and Nickerson is not a photojournalist. Her subject is faith itself, as enacted in day-to-day life by members of religious orders, rather than the institution of the Catholic Church, and she comes at it from the perspective of contemporary art photography (that is, she does not share the priority of reportage photography, which is to tell stories in the form of single images or photo essays). In fact, the history of western painting, from Byzantine icons to Renaissance portraiture, provides a more relevant reference point for her approach.
Before she pressed a single shutter release, she embarked on systematic research, visiting many museums and churches throughout Europe, including the Byzantine Museum in Athens, which boasts one of the most remarkable collections of early Christian iconography in existence.
"I looked at a great deal of religious painting," she says. The icon painters, and the artists of the Gothic and early Renaissance periods, were inventing a visual language as they went along. "I was aware that, traditionally, what we see corresponds to how the church wanted to be seen." But at the same time, the representations of individual figures in architectonic spaces "are so simple, so pure, that they are extremely powerful."
When she came to visit convents and monasteries throughout Ireland, it occurred to her that the background colours of the rooms and corridors were recognisable versions of those she saw in paintings by Fra Angelico, "and really the monks and nuns wore the same clothes as those in Fra Angelico's paintings". In many respects, Nickerson was witnessing a medieval culture and way of life perpetuated into the 21st century.
Northern European painting of the early Renaissance also informs her portraits, which have an extraordinary directness and clarity. The figures are mostly posed against plain backgrounds.
Views of spartan interiors have the same spare clarity. Nickerson was struck by the lack of ostentation.
"The most difficult thing is to see what is in front of you," she says of her approach. "It really is about simply looking and seeing what is there. But arriving at that is very difficult. Emotions, prejudice, any number of factors can get in the way."
Initially she sent approximately 50 letters to different communities, requesting their cooperation. She received "a few" responses. She understands why people were hesitant.
"There was a lot of letter-writing, a lot of negotiation," she says. "People wanted to look at me and see if I was dangerous."
After some initial acceptances, access became progressively easier, and Nickerson is extremely grateful for the level of cooperation she received.
"I'm still overwhelmed at the generosity of these people in allowing me into their lives in this way," she says.
AS SHE IS at pains to point out, her aims were neither to disparage nor enhance the church. She is not a Catholic herself.
"I wouldn't put myself in the position of defending the church," she says. "That was never something I had in mind." Rather what interested her was "the physical manifestation of a way of life predicated on an absolute and unquestioning faith. These people live their faith every day of their lives. As Kieran Moore points out in his piece for the catalogue, our relationship with God has changed over the centuries."
Moore argues that while early religious art was intended to induce awe and provide instruction for massed congregations, these days believers have something more like a personal relationship with the divinity. The idea of this personal relationship, pursued with complete commitment, fascinated Nickerson.
She was born in Boston and, from the age of about 18 or so, was involved in the world of commercial photography in New York. She worked in portraiture and fashion, for five years or so as an assistant to a number of established photographers and then for herself for a further 10 years. It was, she says now, "a great education", a bit like the old apprenticeship system in the arts. She increasingly felt, though, that there was nothing of herself in the work. It was tailored to someone else's vision, to the needs and preferences of the client. Her decision to get out of it was, in the end, "fairly instant. At the time I was miserable for various reasons. I more or less woke up one morning and thought, this just doesn't mean anything to me."
As it happened, at the time a friend of hers had invited her to Zimbabwe, and "I arrived there with no clue as to what I was going to do". In the event, she spent nearly four years there, three of them travelling around southern Africa.
"For the first year I didn't even take a single photograph," she says.
Gradually, she became interested in the disparity between western views of Africa and the reality for people living there. She photographed farm labourers from region to region, accumulating a body of work. In time, she moved on to London, where she had all her film processed.
"Then I put the negatives away in a drawer," she says. "Eventually it was the people in the lab - they were friends - who said, look, you really have to do something with those images or we will."
She took their advice and the result was an award-winning book, Farm, published by Jonathan Cape, and a series of exhibitions, in Paris, Qatar and New York. She met an Irishman in Paris and they came here to live in Co Louth five years ago. In embarking on Farm, Nickerson knew she was arriving into the world of art photography as an outsider.
"I never went to university, was never part of that academic structure that is part of the way the art world works," she says. "I'm self-taught, essentially, but it's been okay so far. I think there's room for all of us."
She did have her years of experience working for fashion houses, magazines and commercial companies to draw on, and she had developed self-confidence about what she was doing.
"It was when I was into my 30s that I really felt, well, I do want to say something, I've reached a kind of maturity, I have a point of view," she says. "What I want to do is to translate what my eye sees into images that make sense to other people."
Faith continues at the Paul Kane Gallery, 6 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, until Oct 7; www.thepaulkanegallery.com