For Wilshire Baptist Church
Riding from Chicago O’Hare International Airport toward downtown I struck up a conversation with Vandell Cobb, my Uber driver, and learned that he had been a globe-hopping fashion and news photographer in his earlier days. I know enough about photography from my own career that we were able to cover a lot of topics in our 45 minutes together – including the huge changes from film and print publications to digital files and web-based media.
When I asked him where his favorite places were to shoot, he said the South of France and South Africa. When I asked him why, he didn’t hesitate: “The light. There’s just something special about the light in those places. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful.”
Now, I know that professional photographers have always been able to augment natural light with flash kits, diffusers, reflectors and other equipment. But in Vandell’s day he didn’t have tools like Photoshop to manipulate and enhance his images. He had to rely on what nature gave him, and beautiful light – true, real light – was worth the time and expense of going to where it could be found.
That conversation had me thinking about an interview I did last year with Clark Baker, a photography professor at Baylor University. He said that when he gives students assignments now he has to give them strict instructions to shoot photos and bring him the raw images without digital manipulation. He discovered they were spending more time altering and enhancing images on their computers and less time finding and capturing real images in the field.
I can see how this is a problem because my web browser and email are inundated with ads for computer programs and apps that will transform bland pictures into works of art. With a few clicks, a gray, lifeless sky can be transformed into a candy-colored canopy of iridescent light.
Clark wants his students to learn how to compose an image with their eyes and their brain rather than with technology. He wants them to spend time seeking and finding images that are true and real. As Vandell might say, he wants them to seek the wonderful, beautiful light that is in the real world.
My ride with Vandell ended at Logan Square Anglican Church in a beautiful old neighborhood northwest of downtown Chicago. I was there because Alex Wilgus, son of my friends Ken and Sally, was being ordained into the Anglican diaconate. In time, he will likely become a priest, but he has been the lay leader of that congregation since it was planted by the Greenhouse Movement in that neighborhood six years ago.
Alex has committed his life to working in a neighborhood and in a city that is in need of the true light of the one true lord. He’s entering the ministry at a time when young people his age are hungry for a sense of worth, validation and meaning. Too often, whether through social media or other lifestyle choices, they create images of themselves that are false to what God created in them.
I say young people, but the temptation to enhance our image and thus our place in the world knows no age limits. And so it was good during the service to stand and recite the Nicene Creed, with these words:
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God.
They are words that capture a real picture of what hasn’t changed and what doesn’t change: the source of true, beautiful light and what ultimately is most worthy of our focus.