Dennis Morris is a phenomenon in photographic circles. At the age of 11, a photo he took of a Palestine Liberation Organisation demonstration featured on the front page of The Daily Mirror.
In 1973, aged 14, he was invited by Bob Marley to photograph the reggae singer’s UK tour. From then until Marley’s death in 1981, Dennis took iconic images of him and the Wailers that appeared on the covers of Time Out and Melody Maker.
As a result, Johnny Rotten, a big reggae fan, asked personally for Dennis to take the first official pictures of the Sex Pistols when they signed to Virgin Records.
Despite his track record, however, Dennis might have been forgiven if he’d taken a deep breath at one particular commission, brought to him by a vicar and a youth worker last year. They wanted him to take photographs that would give the Easter story contemporary relevance for young people.
Nevertheless, Dennis agreed, and for a fee that was a seventh the size of what he could usually command for a commission from the music industry.
The images form part of an Easter resource pack jointly sponsored by the Diocese of London and CMS. A grant from the Westhill Foundation enabled CMS to part fund the resource.
The pack has already been distributed to all Standing Advisory Councils for Religious Education in local education authorities nationwide and to selected media.
Also, a flyer for the pack has been sent to every primary school in the UK with the ultimate aim of helping young people to make connections between the Easter story and their own lives.
It has been designed to be highly flexible for use in a variety of ways in churches or schools, including workshops, assemblies, all-age worship, young people’s groups, in part or as a complete package.
The concept and responsibility for the resource rested with Bob Mayo, priest of a London parish, and youth worker Ben Bell, who co-ordinated the involvement of a group of non-Christian young people from St Mary's Youth Club, Islington, to play ‘roles’ in the photos.
Some of them helped to recreate the scene of the Last Supper in Shepherd’s Bush.
One of them played the role of a black teenage ‘Jesus’ in the rain on a concrete playground in a deserted park doubling for the Garden of Gethsemane.
“I wanted to give a spontaneous feel and quality to each photo,” says Dennis. “I focused on ensuring that each of them looked like it wasn’t too set or staged. I was going for a snapshot feel, immediacy, capturing a moment in time.”
Nonetheless, all the shots took several hours of pre-planning and thought beforehand, “even if taking a particular shot only took five minutes,” says Dennis.
The contact with the project prompted him to admire Ben’s ability to reach out to the youngsters, because some of them, he points out, were “quite hardcore”.
“Three of them had confidence, a light to them, hopeful futures. What the three had was very clear to me. But it’s a pity that youth clubs aren’t seen in the same light as they were when I was young. Then they were where things were ‘happening’. Now, if you attend a youth club, you’re seen as ‘weak’ by other teenagers.”
Bob was delighted with the results of the photographer’s work, “Dennis is an absolute genius at what he does.
“The young people wanted short, sharp bursts of activity followed by long periods for them to relax and talk together.
“Dennis wanted patience and precision in order to capture on camera what he was picturing in his head.
“Ben and I had our own understanding of how the events should be pictured but we needed to give the story away in order to get it back reshaped and re-invigorated through these pictures.”
The project soon took on a life of its own, he says. “It drew together the curiosity and boredom of the young people, Dennis' imagination and intuition as the photographer, and Ben's and my need to get the project completed. Each of us fought the others for control.”
Summing up, Bob admits, “It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. It enabled us to look at the world through different eyes.”
From: http://www.cms-uk.org/tabid/151/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/144/Shooting-Jesus.aspx
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Luke 19:28-Luke 24:50
1 comment:
Great photos. I was struck also by the fact that the packets were available to primary schools so that students could connect with the Easter story. That so couldn't happen in the U.S. It reminds me of our being startled in Germany to take you to a public school and find out that you went next door to the Lutheran Church for some activities. Do you remember doing a school Christmas play there? Separation of church and state apparently is not a universal idea!
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