Signs of the times

How often do we pass by these hand-painted messages someone either slapped together in a desperate moment, or labored over in the hope that people who saw them would be touched in some way. I’ve seen them, many on barns or silos on Midwestern farms, but some in the inner city, and I always take notice. One barn roof in Wisconsin reads “Help Other People Always”, and another barn side further up the road says “Study Natural Law”, to which I say ‘amen.’

Someone who was moved by the very first one he saw started a long process of documenting this landscape of transcendent expression, and turned it into a bound collection called “Bible Road”. The current issue of Voices magazine carries this book review.

When photographer Sam Fentress drove down Highway 21 in Washington County, Missouri one day in 1981, he had no idea that he was about to launch a project that would span more than two decades, involve travel to every state in the continental US, several exhibits, and the publication this spring of Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape.

Along the side of the road near the tiny settlement of Fertile, Missouri, he saw an unusual structure: a life-size figure of Jesus knocking at the “door” of a large red heart, surmounted by the commanding words “Let Me In”. He stopped, backed up his car and photographed it.

Curious, he walked to the nearby house to see who had constructed this unique roadside message. The lady’s name was Hazel Barton. She told the young photographer she had “put it up in case somebody coming around the curve on a Saturday night, maybe drunk, would see it and wonder what’s what and change their life”. At that time, Fentress, who had not yet been baptized, did not know that the image was taken from a verse in the Book of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him” (Rev. 3:20), a passage often understood to mean that Christ is standing at the door of each person’s heart, waiting to be admitted by an act of faith. Mrs. Barton told him that she had wanted the sign to read, “A latch you must open” — in other words, one must cooperate with the grace Jesus offers. She wanted her son, Norman, to write that on the sign, she explained, “as he was the only one tall enough to do it, but he said there wasn’t room, so he painted ‘Let Me In’ instead”.

Go to that link and look at that, and the other photos from Sam’s book. It’s really a journey…and at the same time, an art form.

The photographs do not impose the photographer’s personal opinion on the subject matter he transmits to us. The book is a “documentary” rather than a subjective interpretation filtered through an artist’s imagination.

“My approach has been to take a hot subject matter and take a cool distanced perspective in presenting the subject”, Fentress said. “There is in the art world a certain acceptance of documentary photography — a cool, distanced look at subject matter that will allow even highly charged subject matter to be presented as it is — whether it’s a war or something that’s very questionable morally or religious. It’s as if to say, ‘here it is, here’s this phenomenon that’s out in the world’, and I’m aware of that effect, and I wanted to make sure that the pictures are a literal rendition of something that is really out there in America”.

It’s getting a lot of attention in the media, in many different forms.

But the Voices article is most intruiging, chronicling Fentress’ journey both terrestrial and spiritual, from Nietzsche and Marx and Freud, to…Benedict.

What do the “Bible road signs” have to do with the author’s Catholic faith?

“Pope Benedict became pope after all of my work was done on this book”, Fentress says. “But his critique of relativism and his desire for Europe to return to its Christian roots really resonates with me, because that’s where I was when I first encountered the signs and began to document them — I was sort of a European relativist from Nashville”.

That’s irresistible.