ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 is the first of a pair of studies on the relationship between the photographic image and the sacred. After considering some definitions and debates concerning what is meant by the sacred, including Mircea Eliade, Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, the first section examines the question of how the visual had been utilised to invoke the sacred, or make reference to the absent or invisible deity or sacred presence. It considers the importance of the Christian belief in an incarnated God and how that has informed visual representation throughout the Christian era and beyond and into the photographic era. The prohibitions on the making of images of deities in Judaism, Christianity and Islam are discussed.
All of the questions are then related more precisely to photography, from the belief, in opposition to its rationalist origins, that the medium might be used to detect the presence on non-material entities, through to photographic work and concepts concerned with secular notions of the sacred, sometimes known as the parasacred, including the question of representing mortality.
