Video: Listen to S. Billie Mandle discuss this project with Kirstin Valdez Quade. 

 

FOR TEN YEARS, I PHOTOGRAPHED Catholic confessionals throughout the United States. I photographed in ornate city basilicas and airy rural chapels, modern churches with angled pews and cathedrals with drafty stained-glass windows. Despite the diversity of places and architecture, there was a similarity to the confessionals. They were pragmatic spaces, often constructed with acoustic tile, and more neglected than the churches themselves. In these small, dark rooms, I found traces of people, communities, prayers, and dogmas.

Photographing from the perspective of the penitent, I used a large-format camera and available light, creating images that are more metaphorical than typological. As a queer woman raised Catholic, I have had a complex relationship to the church—making these photographs was part confession, part reconciliation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

---

S. Billie Mandle is an artist based in Los Angeles and western Massachusetts and an assistant professor at Hampshire College. A book of Reconciliation, with text by Kirstin Valdez Quade, will be published by Kehrer Verlag in spring 2020.