Join J. Sybylla Smith in conversation with S. Billie Handle about her new book, Reconciliation. For ten years S. Billie Mandle photographed confessionals throughout the United States. She visited churches in small towns and large cities, creating images that depict the visible – and invisible – traces of people, communities, histories and dogmas.
The images speak to the beliefs that define these dark rooms and shape this intimate yet institutional ritual. Photographing from the perspective of the penitent, she used a large format camera and available light, creating images that are more metaphorical than typological. As a queer woman raised Catholic, Mandle has long had a complex relationship to the Church; these photographs are part confession, part reconciliation.

»When you go to confession on a Saturday night, you go into a warm, dimly lit vastness, with the smell of wax and incense in the air, the smell of burning candles, and if it is a hot summer night there is the sound of a great electric fan, and the noise of the streets coming in to emphasize the stillness.«
– Excerpt from Confession from The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day

Hardcover22,4 x 28 cm
104 pages
40 color illustration
ISBN 978-3-86828-951-02020
Published by Kehrer Verlag
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