Religion seen hiding in protest photos
Ken Light never saw the zealous imagery in work until pointed out
For more than five decades, documentary photographer Ken Light has been shooting Americans without seeing the religion in his images. He made pictures of evangelists standing waistdeep in lake water, shot photos of back tattoos, billboards and war protesters tied to crosses or splayed out on the pavement by cops.
But it took Elizabeth Peña, who teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, to recognize the theme. In 2016, she brought her students to see an exhibit of his work on social justice in the 1960s, and asked Light, who runs the photojournalism program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, to show her his back catalog.
Now seven giant black-andwhites are on display in “Religion and Resistance,” at the Doug Adams Gallery on the Graduate Theological Union campus, on Berkeley’s Northside.
“I tell stories about communities and people that are unseen,” Light says. “These photographs were all part of other projects, and I never thought of them as part of a show that would be called ‘Resistance and Religion.’ ”
Peña has a broad definition of religion, which includes atheism. It also includes protest posters and placards. She’s been mulling the theme while nursing a grievance for a year. (“Jan. 20, 2017, to be exact,” she says, referring to Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.)
“I was inspired by signs I saw at the Women’s March in Washington that referenced religion in one way or another,” she says. “Our gallery is the perfect place to talk about the ongoing connection between religion and protest.”
Peña has run the Doug Adams Gallery for five years, but for four of those years the gallery was hidden inside an academic building. Last year, it moved into the Union’s renovated campus bookstore with a storefront on LeConte Avenue.
“It’s this hidden gem of a gallery that I didn’t even know about,” says Light, whose prints take up one wall.
A second wall is covered with signage from the protests that inspired the show. A third wall is made up of protest posters spanning 50 years, most of them from the collection of Lincoln Cushing. These include a photo of three people on their knees praying, by the famed documentarian Danny Lyon, that was turned into a recruitment poster for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1962.
The most astonishing piece is a floor-to-ceiling papier-mâché puppet of Oscar Romero, the archbishop of San Salvador who was assassinated in 1980, while offering Mass in a chapel. The puppet was borrowed from Glover, Vt., which is a long way from the billboard on Seventh Street in West Oakland that Light happened to pass while driving his 1970 VW bus. It was Christmastime, and the star caught his eye.
“I saw the word ‘peace,’ ” he recalls. “Then I saw the slogan ‘The Navy,’ ” underneath it. That was enough to compel him to turn the bus around, park and put his Nikon on a tripod and capture a long exposure.
That picture was made in 1975, as Light was pursuing a book on West Oakland — a book that has still never found a publisher. He shot hundreds of rolls of film over three years and has 100 images. This billboard photo is the first of his West Oakland project to be seen in public.
“Ken creating a photo of religious symbolism is itself an act of protest,” Peña says.
“These photographs were all part of other projects, and I never thought of them as part of a show that would be called ‘Resistance and Religion.’ ” Ken Light, photographer
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@ sfchronicle.com Instagram: @sfchronicle_art