Of the various visual media which have been used to recontextualize Bible stories and characters, photography offers a particularly direct connection with our modern world. Artists have recontextualized Christ through photography in a wide variety of ways, often choosing to appropriate him in order to comment on socio-political issues of the day.

In 1982, Duane Michals staged a series entitled Christ in New York, at a time when Christian conservativism in the U.S. was increasingly vociferous in defending traditional family values—opposing, among other things, abortions and homosexuality. Michals’s series shows a haloed man appearing in six scenes that include Christ sees a woman being attacked and Christ is shot by a mugger with a handgun and dies. In each, Michals included a pencilled caption: a description that emphasizes Christ’s relative passivity in the scenes.

It is a crafted narration of something like the Passion: things either happen in front of Jesus as detached observer, or they happen violently to him. Christ is beaten defending a homosexual in this sense conflates some of the foreboding events that happen either side of the woman’s judgement in John’s Gospel. The crowd wants to seize Jesus, the teachers of the law want him arrested (7:30, 32, 44), and this escalates to a near-tipping-point of tension when they pick up stones to stone him (8:59). He is the one under attack, under condemnation.

That Michals shows us this premature crucifixion as a moment of defence, however, is poignant in a number of ways. It brings us back to the text about the woman caught in adultery, and to the issue of what, or who, is defended and why. As a gay man, Michals’s Catholic upbringing led to his own experiences of condemnation, and he has acknowledged that this work came out of his anger towards the religious hypocrisy of the time. By putting Christ in the way of a man who is accused of being in sin, and representative of many others accused in this way, the defence is clear. Michals would have his Jesus intervene in the political-religious righteousness of the day, this time offering a physical protection that is at once simply human and divinely loving. It is sharply observed, with both wryness and pathos, bringing us face-to-face with Jesus’s sacrificial act of salvation.

References

Gottschalk, Karin. 2017 [2002]. ‘Duane Michals: Asking Questions Without Answers’, www.Untitled.net, available at https://creativityinnovationsuccess.wordpress.com/archive/duane-michals-asking-questions-without-answers/ [accessed 28 June 2022]

Mirlesse, Sabine. 2013. ‘Duane Michals by Sabine Mirlesse, 26 March 2013’, www.bombmagazine.org, available at https://bombmagazine.org/articles/duane-michals-1/ [accessed 28 June 2022]