Rebirth and Renewal

April 20, 2025

For Christians, Easter symbolizes rebirth, a new start. This is a universal theme, and something we all aspire, appreciate and yearn for at one time or another.
For Ukrainians, the inspiration of a new start is especially profound given the ravaging of their country for the past 3 years due to the criminal invasion by Russia.
One of the hallmarks of the Easter celebrations in Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox churches is “sviachenia”, or the blessing of the baskets. Faithful bring baskets to church, filled with bread, eggs, meats and other foodstuffs and a candle. Slowly, one by one, candles are lit and the entire church is filled with a warm glow.
I’ve been photographing this ritual (for my ongoing personal project “Faith and Ritual”) since 2018 and each time I find it visually striking and personally inspiring. This year was no different.

Father Ihor Shved sprinkles holy water and blessings upon baskets of the faithful, in a thin shaft of sunlight at the St. Volodymyr and Olga Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral.

A procession makes its way along Stella Avenue in the city’s North End, with the Cathedral as a backdrop, early Sunday morning during Easter.

Father Ihor Shved (left) helps lead parishioners as Bishop Andriy blesses the entrance to the Ukrainian Metropolitan Cathedral of Volodomyr and Olga, on Easter Sunday morning.

A parishioner has a pensive moment during the ceremony, Saturday afternoon.

Parishioners queue up to pray before the shrine at the altar during Saturday’s blessing of the baskets ceremony.

Acts of prayer, contrition and meditation at the shrine and altar of the cathedral.

One by one, a flame gets passed from one end of the cathedral to the other, during the blessing of the baskets ceremony - a highlight of the Easter season in Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox churches.

An Easter rebirth

March 31, 2024

This has been posted here before, but several years ago I started a project about faith rituals - I was just interested in how across all different kinds of cultures, religions, time periods and geographic areas people somehow felt the need to perform various rituals and actions as an expression of faith.
I photographed more variety than I thought possible in a mid-sized Canadian city, but the past year or so it’s been dormant.

Fittingly, in the season of Easter a rebirth of sorts occurred with 2 events connected to the Christian holiday. The festival of Salubong, a procession of religious statues held by the local Filipino community, was held on Easter Sunday morning and the 35th annual Way of the Cross procession was held by the local Catholic archdiocese on the morning of Good Friday.
Salubong was especially gratifying to photograph, as it was the first ritual I photographed in 2018 when I first conceived of this project.

From now, I hope to continue where I left off with this project and pursue other rituals in a variety of faiths. I’m as interested in the regular commonly held ritual - aspects of the everyday like a Christian baptism or candles in a Hindu puja or prayers in a Jewish or Muslim service - as I am in special events or rarer holidays.
If you have a suggestion for this project, please use the Contact form on my website to send me an email, or message me via my Instagram account if you prefer.

A congregant at St. Edwards the Confessor Catholic Church takes part in a procession early Sunday morning as part of the church’s Salubong event.

The sunrise shines over the cross marched on a procession in the 35th annual Way of the Cross Event, Friday morning at the University of Manitoba campus.

Hundreds of people walk quietly in the Way of the Cross event, on Good Friday morning, the only sound moving over the crowd a repeated prayer chant.

The cool twilight of the early Easter morning is punctuated by the warmth of a candle held by an adult chaperoning a children's choir in the city’s North End during the Salubong event.

Canada geese waddle away from a procession of hundreds quietly marching behind a wooden cross on Good Friday.

One of the stations of the cross marks a pause in the 35th annual Way of the Cross, Good Friday morning.

A children’s choir ascends the steps of St. Edwards the Confessor church on Easter Sunday morning.

Salubong procession, Easter Sunday morning.

Shining a light

December 05, 2021

For the past several years (a global pandemic, notwithstanding) I’ve been pursuing a personal project on “faith and rituals”.
I’m not entirely certain what form this project will take in future, and I’m not sure how I’ll make it more focused and specific (I know I need to do that), but a photographer friend once told me with photo essays it’s often best to just start out making pictures you like and let the direction come after some work has been done.

The wisdom of this has started to really be clear to me lately, specifically with two recent events from two different faith communities sharing a common theme.
At the beginning of November I made my way to a small North End temple for the Hindu festival of Diwali. Despite feeling very conspicuous with both my cameras and my obvious non-Hindu status, the people were warm and welcoming and I discreetly observed and (occasionally) made an image.
A month later, the city’s Jewish community gave me an equally welcoming reception for the 8-day festival of Hanukkah. Both the Etz Chayim and the Chabad-Lubavitch were kind enough to answer my questions and support my project efforts and, as with all the faith communities I’ve visited for this work, I was reminded how rich and varied our city actually is — there’s a lot going on beyond our habitual day-to-day surroundings and I’m blessed to have photography allow me to witness that first-hand.

I was also struck by the similarities in different religions and how common visual elements keep coming up, as I photograph more and more for this work. In the case of these two festivals, the element is light — both events are festivals of light, as a symbol of transcendence and expressed in literal form.
Happily, photography is all about light and so it felt fitting to show both of these festivals and what they have in common. L’Chaim and Namaste!