Danielle Levitt’s portraits of a cool church
For a story that only waited until the third sentence to use a “ye of little faith” cliche, GQ’s December 2015 exploration into mega-hipster church Hillsong NYC delivers.
See → What Would Cool Jesus Do? (Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Photographs and Video by Danielle Levitt) in the December 2015 issue of GQ.
This is a personal story, one that focuses most of its initial effort on exploring the humanity of Justin Bieber, baptized in another celebrity’s bathtub by a pastor in Saint Laurent. The rest of this several thousand-word story is an autobiographic exploration of Brodesser-Akner’s own struggles with faith framed by a church that, like the story itself, oozes with sincerity, self-reflection and self-conscious style.
Which is why it’s so important that the visuals in this story are personal. At first, it looks like Levitt is going to cover this story by repeating some of the same basic shots we see in every story about megachurches: anonymous hands in the air silhouetted by colorful lights, a wide shot with more hands in the air, a medium shot with closed eyes and yep, more hands in the air — do evangelicals ever put their hands down?
But in what ends up being the visual cornerstone of the piece, Levitt shifts from the usual megachurch coverage by giving us some actual faces through a brilliantly conceived portrait series of Hillsong NYC attendees.
The dense gallery delivers everything we need to know about these stylish Christians without shouting, you know, “stylish Christians.” The gallery may strike the uninitiated as a bit ironic at first, but you get over it by about frame #7 or so. And by showing us other expressions besides worshipful reverence and awe, we get the sense there is more to the personalities in this congregation than naive passion. We get the sense that we might actually have something in common with these people.
What sticks out right away is frame #5 above (unnamed, but she looks like Storm). Like most of the parishioners in this series Storm is dressed in greyscale with an emphasis on black; her leather jacket melts into the background, just as it does into the deep blacks of the Hillsong worship space. Like a concert, Hillsong NYC is a sea of floating heads in bright greens and oranges from the punctuating bright lights. Levitt gives her subjects a better color balance, but it’s the same concept. As Pastor Carl said in Levitt’s video: “The worse this city is, the better it is for us. The darker a room, the brighter a flashlight.” And the spotlights at Hillsong are never on the architecture or other forms of beauty: they’re always on the people.
There is so much diversity and character in these portraits that you almost forget evangelicals are supposed to be homogenous. There is so little care for explicitly religious symbolism (except for the denim Jesus jacket worn by Gerry Fortilus in frame #1, which he’s probably wearing ironically anyway), that you realize these are real people with real lives outside of church. Just like us, some of the subjects exude confidence (like Jenny Gonzalez, frame #15), while others convey a bit of insecurity (Joshua Holohan, frame #16). All of this they do with so much subtlety. Maggie Anderson, frame #10, looks like she just started going to Hillsong; her makeup is a bit too colorful and she’s wearing what Brodesser-Akner calls the “nothing” hat.
I think a lot of people will go into a story like this looking for wide-eyed hipsters eager to find a new initiation, but Levitt (and her director of photography’s generous edit) does everything she can to break us from that caricature. Better than any silhouette atmospheric shot, these portraits give us the spirit of Brodesser-Akner’s story: that of a group of people who want to look good yet who at the same time are desperate for authenticity. And importantly, this is a tension anyone can relate to. We’ve all worn the nothing hat. Which means this isn’t a portrait series, or a story, about religious people. It’s just about people.
Originally published at kcmcginnis.com.
