In the seventies and eighties, we saw our share of roadside religious signs from the back seat of our family’s Datsun station wagon. As you speed by in your car, there’s a temptation to distance yourself from people who make billboards that say things like Are You Telling Anyone about Jesus Christ? and Obey God or Burn. But when Sam Fentress looks at America, he does not roll his eyes. For the last twenty-five years, on the highways, rural roads, and city streets of forty-nine states, he has been photographing religious signs—on barns, freeway underpasses, telephone poles, and storefronts, in stencil, hand lettering, neon, spray paint, marquee type, and stencil. And not with the dispassionate or ironizing eye of a documentarian. Instead, by deploying all the tools of photography—meticulous composition, depth of field and landscape, the play of light, the isolating effect of the frame—Fentress gives these messages a dignity that is chilling. As you page through Bible Road, the book that collects over 150 of these photos, the cumulative effect becomes haunting: Sam Fentress sees a passion in America that transcends regionalism, kitsch, and denomination. The fervor appears everywhere, in cities and in the country, blue states and red. Seen through Fentress’s lens, the messages—Thou God Seest Me; The Eyes of the Lord Are In Every Place Beholding Good and Evil; or just Jesus painted on a cracked wall—become so starkly poignant that we can’t dismiss them as quirky backwoods religion or a product of the chaotic lives of the urban poor. The buildings and landscapes testify that life in our country is not easy, though occasionally it is painfully beautiful. The landscape is ravaged and glorious; the signs are weather beaten; the cities are clotted with advertisements, trash, and decay; the paths to the doors of the small rural churches are grown high with weeds. Everywhere, under all circumstances, people are moved to make signs. At times, the images provoke a smile (Mower Sales / Salvation Is Free), but in Fentress’s eyes, the gestures are never pathetic. He dwells on these acts of writing with loving attention and without condescension. As Paul Elie writes in the introduction, by photographing these signs, Fentress transfigures them.

Some of Fentress’s work is featured in Image issue 16.

Biography

Sam Fentress was raised in Nashville and Detroit and in 1977 graduated from Princeton University with Emmet Gowin as his teacher and mentor. His artistic work led in 1978 to his being named one of the youngest recipients of an Emerging Artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1980 he received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 1981 he began making documentary photographs of religious messages along the American road, eventually traveling to 49 states building a body of work containing thousands of images. Photographs from this series have been in solo and group exhibitions at O.K. Harris in New York, Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Afterimage Gallery in Dallas. His 2007 documentary photography book Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape (David & Charles) led to interviews on CBS News Sunday Morning and NPR News and Notes. The book was covered in First Things, Commonweal, Image, the Houston Chronicle, and USA Today and Newsweek online. Photographs from this series are included in the following public and private collections: The Art Institute of Chicago, Bruce and Nancy Berman, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Center for Documentary Studies/Duke University, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Mississippi Museum of Art, Princeton University Art Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum.

Fentress lives with his wife Betsy and their six children in St. Louis.

Current Projects
March 2008

I hope to be able to publish more photography books, with pictures from various series: people and portraits, still life, architecture, landscape, and a series of abstract photographs made from moving cars at night. Some of these series are recent interests, some have pictures from thirty years ago and last month.