Religious Experience
Matthew Turley on discovering his surprising new personal project.
All photos © Matthew Turley.
One month. That was the plan. Matthew Turley, photographer, world traveler, and lifelong outdoorsman, would headquarter himself in Tblisi, Georgia’s bustling capital city, for four weeks of what he calls “unstructured time.” He’d follow his curiosity wherever it led him and his camera.
Much to his surprise, it led him to church. To a fascination with the pageantry and devotion of the Georgian Orthodox Church, whose history dates back to the 1st Century.
“I like to go to a place and respond to what I’m feeling when I get there,” explains Turley, whose career spans more than two decades of epic image-making on six continents, much of it focused on the natural world. “Religion wasn’t part of the plan.”
But while Turley was in Tblisi, Ilia II of Georgia, the Catholicos-Patriarch of All Georgia, died. He had led the Georgian Orthodox Church for nearly half a century, and thousands gathered in the capital to follow his funeral cortege to his final resting place at Sioni Cathedral. Intrigued by this profound show of unity, Turley joined them.
He was moved by what he saw. There were so many people that the walk to the cathedral took hours. Yet no one spoke. This was a time for reverence. “It felt private, organic,” says Turley.
Seeking to be respectful, he photographed surreptitiously, seeing images everywhere but raising his camera only selectively. A sea of people moving toward a shared destination. Light streaming through the windows of the ancient cathedral. Mourners in worshipful silence…
The images Turley brought back are now the basis of a new personal project inspired by what he describes as the purity of this experience. A purity that in some ways reminds him of being in nature, which for him is a religion in itself.
So he’ll go back. He’ll dive deeper. He’ll explore further. The photographs you see here are just the beginning. The start of Turley’s favorite kind of trip: an open-ended journey.
