cover image The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption

The Face of Forgiveness: Salvation and Redemption

. powerHouse Books, $49.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-1-57687-250-5

Getting ""inside the velvet rope"" is photographer Katzman's phrase for gaining access to Christian revival services in Florida, Brazil and Mozambique, where he shot worshippers in the throes of the most extreme emotional states. His stunningly intimate black-and-white images, collected in this volume, show believers sobbing, drooling and falling to the ground as they are wracked with spasms of joy. A freak show in the tradition of Diane Arbus? Katzman makes it impossible to see it that way when he declares that he himself found God in the course of producing this book. Indeed, in his introduction art critic A.D. Coleman calls the book an ""act of bearing witness,"" though it's hard to see how it could be a very useful tool of evangelism. As sympathetically as they are regarded by Katzman, the believers in these photos still have an unsettling specimen-like quality, displayed as they are in isolation from all but the most intense and dramatic aspects of their faith. Then there the potentially subversive details Katzman's wide-angle lens takes in: the faces of those who are seemingly amused at the outlandish displays of their fellow worshippers, for example, and the pensive expressions of children unsure what to make of the adult clamor around them. It is to Katzman's credit as an artist that what he has produced, far from being a piece of propaganda, is a document that will astonish and move open-minded people on both sides of that velvet rope.