It was nearly three decades ago that photographer Greg Miller first snapped an Ash Wednesday image, on the streets of downtown New York.
The US photographer’s enduring project to capture the portraits of people after they received the ancient religious marking brought him to Belfast, in his first foreign foray on Lent’s beginning.
Mr Miller, who published a 2018 book ‘Unto Dust’ gathering together the portraits captured annually in Manhattan from 1997, decided Belfast would be the prime place to expand internationally because “there’s something about the history and that added power” of the place.
The 56-year-old Nashville, Tennessee-born fine art photographer on Wednesday visited Elmwood Hall near Queen’s University, Clonard Monastery off the Falls and was planning attending an evening service at St Matthew’s Church of Ireland in the Shankill area.
Mr Miller had heard nothing of the practice of placing ash on the foreheads of congregants when he first came across someone in New York. It was firmly in line with his broader philosophy centred on serendipity, chance meetings leading to long term street photography projects.
“I am a humanist, raised a Methodist, and I did not not know anything about Ash Wednesday until I happened on that person. I then began photographing a few more people that year and the next year,” Mr Millar explained.
“I realised I could do a project about displaying their religion on one day of the year. It moved me without being terribly religious.
“I was interested in the humanity of it all, this ancient mark and people in their everyday working clothes and place.”
To mark the beginning of a period of penance, it is said ashes were first scattered in the Christian Roman times with the mark introduced some time between the 8th and 10th centuries.
Following the 2018 publication of the New York-centred ‘Unto Dust’, the photographer travelled farther afield, to Washington DC, South Carolina and Florida, and now, on his first foreign trip as part of the project, to Belfast.
“I think I was moved to come to Belfast because of the history of the place and what it means to be Catholic here,” he said.
In the US, he had no idea of, and did not ask, what type of Christian they were, but understands it is still an issue here. Clonard was a place where he wanted to visit, along with St Matthew’s.
Mr Miller, whose work has been exhibited in solo shows in Los Angeles, Barcelona and Nashville, jointly in New York and as part of several permanent collections, did not find the people of Belfast too self-conscious about having their portraits taken.
Near Queen’s, some of the students had to run off to class, but at Clonard there was “a lot of queuing going on”.
