Extended Artist Statement The Light Within Kari Vaughn As a young child I wasn’t very familiar with Quakerism, but as I got older I started occasionally attending Quaker Meeting for Worship with my dad and later attended high school on a Quaker campus in Greensboro, North Carolina. As I gained more exposure to Quakerism (formally known as the Religious Society of Friends) I became more interested. I wanted to use this semester’s capstone project as an opportunity to explore what it means to be Quaker. The Light Within is an audio and photography project examining what Quakerism means to different people, incorporating the variety of personal experiences within the faith tradition, though most of the voices in the project fall on the Conservative, traditional, less evangelical end of the broad spectrum of Quaker practice. This project didn’t start out having an audio component. It was originally a photography project, but as I started spending more time with Quakers—asking them to show me around, photographing them, attending Meeting with them, and talking with them—it became very clear that I had to include audio. All the voices I was hearing and the words being spoken communicated a kind of peace very different from that of the photographs. And because the stories and experiences were all so personal, I wanted to let them speak for themselves. Having originally come to CDS as a photographer and wanting the challenge of capturing something spiritual in a visual way, I didn’t abandon the photography portion of the project, but used the audio as inspiration for making the photos. I made pinhole cameras to document the subject. For those less familiar, pinhole cameras are cameras in their simplest form. Fundamentally, a pinhole camera is a light-tight box with a tiny hole in it. Usually there is no lens, so light enters the camera through the pinhole and is recorded on the film, paper, or sensor in the back of the box. I made numerous cameras but ultimately used only two for my project. One was made from an Altoids tin and was adapted for 35mm film, and the other was a repurposed camera body cap outfitted with a tin can pinhole that I attached to a rangefinder camera. In many ways Pinhole cameras are metaphors for Quakerism. The most obvious metaphor is the tradition of simplicity. Pinhole cameras have no distracting buttons, features, or settings. Additionally, Quakers believe everyone has direct and immediate access to God, and in the same way, pinhole cameras have no viewfinder to separate the photographer from the subject, and no lens to separate the subject from the film. Finally, Quakerism involves an element of faithful and silent waiting. In the same way, pinholes are incredibly small so my exposures often lasted 30 seconds. Because I had no viewfinder, I had no idea what the photos would look like. I simply pointed my camera and waited faithfully and silently, trusting that the exposure I was making was “right.” The entire process—everything from making the cameras to photographing to
developing—was personal and involved; consequently the series of photographs reflect my personal journey, and the photographs are sequenced to document the evolution in my approach throughout the semester. Even when using the audio as inspiration, I started out thinking I could only photograph traditional, very obviously-Quaker subjects and traditional Quaker spaces. But even as I photographed these Quaker spaces and started spending a lot of time in them, I began to respond to the qualities of the Light both inside and outside the Meetinghouses. In this process I began to shoot more freely and see things in a different way, often focusing on different details. Then as my awareness grew I began to notice—in everyday life outside of Meetinghouses and other Quaker spaces–details and elements of Quakerism and things I recalled from the audio recordings. A lot of messages given in Meeting are about nature, about seeing the beauty in everything around us, and about walking, as George Fox said, “cheerfully over the world.” I often came away from Meeting more in tune with the world around me, and more aware of beautiful tiny details I might otherwise pass by. The pinhole cameras I used facilitated this shift because their short focal lengths require close proximity between camera and subject to produce an image in the way the human eye might see it. As I became more involved in the process, making deliberate decisions to use pinhole cameras and the audio as inspiration, my approach shifted from more literal to more metaphorical. As I began to see things in different ways, and began to respond differently to common scenes as a result of the voices and experiences I had been collecting, the entire series of photos progressed similarly. I began to be freer with the way I was shooting, all the while keeping in mind those voices and experiences. I transitioned from photographing outward evidence of Quakerism to documenting and representing inward experiences. --Special thanks to: Ted Benfey, Toby Berla, Max Carter, Gwen Erickson, Bruce Graddy, Mia Graddy, John March, Dan Read, Emily Stewart, Durham Friends Meeting, Friends Historical Collection at Guilford College, and Alex Harris and the Spring 2015 Capstone class for the Undergraduate Certificate in Documentary Studies.