Sheona Beaumont, The Bible in Photography: Index, Icon, Tableau, Vision (London: T&T Clark, 2024). 227pp. ISBN 9780567706539
Reviewed by Dr Rod Benson
In this book, British academic Sheona Beaumont explores the photographic representation of biblical narrative through the lens of twentieth-century cultural criticism.
It’s an expansive topic and, to fully appreciate her insights, you may need a humanities degree and the luxury of time to re-read many of Beaumont’s dense though rewarding sentences. Mercifully, the introductory chapter provides a detailed outline of each chapter as well as an explanation of her big idea.
Beaumont observes the surprising ubiquity of biblical subjects in photography. She finds allusions to biblical stories, characters and symbols in a multitude of photographic ideas and practices – in works of art and in books, but also in journalism, advertising, liturgy, theoretical discourse, and in the written work of photographers.
The book is in two parts. In Part 1, the author reflects on what she sees as the “complex and conflicting ideological assumptions behind the various approaches to realism in biblical texts and photographic images, not to mention in the attempt to bring them together” (3).
Chapter 1 examines the fourfold sense of Scripture as understood in medieval theology with a focus on the literal sense, given that a photograph is often perceived to present a “literal” rendering of “reality”. It then explores aspects of the historical-critical notion of an imagined reality positioned “behind” the text, interacting with the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Chapter 2 discusses the iconographic and transcendental approaches to visual realism in art history, concluding with a discussion of sociological readings of culture after Marshall McLuhan.
Chapter 3 seeks to map a critical space between word and image, theory and history. Here, Beaumont presents her distinctive contribution to the discourse on art and theology and their interrelations in theory and praxis: her “CMYK model” (more on this below). She wants to achieve “a theological reframing of realism that takes seriously the habitual and inherited assumptions of Western positivism,” arguing that an interdisciplinary repositioning of photography and Scripture offers keys “to a richer accounting of seeing-is-believing within our what-you-see-is-what-you-get culture” (6).
In Part 2, Beaumont examines a theology of the real in photography and the Bible, exploring the extent to which the photograph, as a medium of expression, intentionally describes worldviews and therefore evokes theological questions about such topics as suffering, death, environmental catastrophe, the innocence of children, the value of truth, and the meaning of community. She suggests that discourse on photography typically avoids such interdisciplinary engagement.
The chapters in Part 2 illustrate and expound the four elements of her CMYK model (the four terms in the book’s subtitle). In chapter 4, on the “index,” Beaumont notes that the apparent objectivity of a photographic image (a text whose etymology suggests that it is “written” with “light”) often assumes a superlative authority. This implied authority is used by photographers of real-world biblical landscapes to confirm the veracity of biblical events. She draws analogies between this use of visual texts and the intentions of biblical prophets and writers in framing their words (whether aural or written) as authoritative and truthful.
In chapter 5, the author examines the notion of photographs as “icons,” especially as they evoke biblical characters (e.g. Christ, and Mary). She evokes Walter Benjamin’s idea of the presence of “aura” which arguably taps into profound Jewish and Christian understandings of what it is that connects people with the unseeable and unknowable.
In chapter 6, Beaumont considers the “tableau” as the narrative within which the icon is given meaning. She notes that dramatic narratives of Scripture lend an epic or moralistic frame to staged photographs, and that there are literal and “subsumed” approaches to the interpretation of such images.
Chapter 7, on “vision,” asks whether, in view of recent global cultural change, it is even worthwhile to attempt a hermeneutical anchoring of texts in an age of information and entertainment (and the blurring of distinctions between the two) that threatens to swamp biblical indexality, characters and stories in “a tide of representational flotsam” (9).
Beaumont concludes that all is not lost. Quoting biblical scholar Gordon McConville, she expresses confidence that the way in which the Bible lives on through visual media both accommodates and generates theological imaginative human interpretation.
The heart of this fascinating and challenging book is the fourfold interpretive schema outlined in chapter three and illustrated throughout Part 2. Beaumont appropriates the CMYK colour-separation process for printing, taking the four base colours (black, yellow, magenta and cyan) as analogies for discerning the constituent representational conditions for the expanded perception of realism in contemporary visual culture which she advocates.
Beaumont argues that this fourfold analogy relates to four key concepts discernible in modern cultural criticism, and which are “variously composed and variously embedded with potential theological freight” (71). Each is linked, in Part 2, with the thought of a prominent cultural theorist: Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, John Berger, and Jean Baudrillard. Together, these theologically enriched “interpretive priorities” in Western realism allude to “the thicker, broader, ideological and theological conditions of contemporary visual understanding” (72).
This opens the possibility of building a cultural theory that accommodates visual and verbal theologies in ways that are balanced and integrated and possess enduring value.
Sheona Beaumont is Bishop Otter Scholar for Theology and the Arts in the Diocese of Chichester, UK, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College, London. With Madeleine Emerald Thiele, she coedited Transforming Christian Thought in the Visual Arts: Theology, Aesthetics, and Practice (London: Routledge, 2021), in which she has a chapter on “Photography as the Bible’s new illumination.” The present volume includes an extensive bibliography and a general index.
Image source: public domain.
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