Photography as Worship

I don't go to church. I go to the Parthenon.

Not the one in Athens. The one in Nashville, in Centennial Park, the full-scale replica that most people drive past on their way to something else. I go there at night, usually alone, usually with a coffee, and I sit against the columns and I don't do anything. I just look.

I didn't plan for this to become a thing. I moved to Nashville and started taking photos because I needed somewhere to put what I was feeling and words weren't working. A breakup. A new city. A version of myself I didn't recognize yet. The camera was easier than talking.

But something happened that I wasn't expecting. I started seeing.

Not looking — seeing. There's a difference that matters. Looking is passive. You look at a building the way you look at a menu. It's information. Seeing is when the building stops you. When the light hits the concrete at an angle that makes your chest tighten for a reason you can't explain. When a neon sign cropped just right stops being signage and becomes color and heat and something almost alive.

I take photos of Nashville the way most people don't. I shoot the grit. Empty parking lots at golden hour. Neon signs so close you can see the gas inside the tubes. Brick walls with decades of paint layered underneath. Streets with no people on them. The Nashville that exists after everyone goes home.

People ask me why I don't shoot the tourist stuff. The pedestrian bridge. Broadway at night. The "I Believe in Nashville" mural with someone posed in front of it. And the honest answer is those things don't make me feel anything. They're designed to be seen. The things I photograph were never designed to be beautiful. They just are, quietly, and nobody stops for them.

I think that's worship. Not the religious kind. The kind where you pay attention to something so completely that for a few seconds nothing else exists. The texture of a column. The way sodium light turns everything amber. A coffee cup on the ground next to a piece of architecture that's been standing since before you were born.

Most of my photos have an absence in them. Something cropped out, something blurred, something just beyond the frame. I didn't do that on purpose at first. But I've started to understand it. The absence is the point. It's the space between what you see and what you feel. It's the part of the image that your brain tries to complete, and in that completion, something happens. You stop scrolling. You lean in. You go back.

I never take more than a few photos of anything. Usually one. Because the image exists in my head before I take it. I see the final photo — the light, the framing, the blur, the color — and then I just execute. The phone is the last step. My brain already did the work.

That probably sounds pretentious. I don't care.

Here's what I've learned in three months of doing this every day: the camera doesn't capture what you see. It captures how you see. Two people can stand in the same parking lot at the same sunset and take completely different photos because they're not photographing the same thing. One person is photographing a sunset. The other is photographing what it feels like to be alone in a parking lot watching the sky turn colors while the world moves on without you.

I'm the second person.

I grew up in a small town. Thirty thousand people. I was the one who didn't fit — gay, quiet, always watching. I learned early to pay very close attention to everything around me because the world wasn't built for me and I needed to understand its rules to survive it. That attention didn't go away when I left. It just found a new outlet.

Nashville is my cathedral now. Every building I photograph is a room I'm walking into emotionally. Every neon sign is a candle. Every empty street at 3 AM is a pew. I go to the Parthenon and sit against the columns and drink my coffee and feel small, and feeling small is a relief when your brain never stops running.

I don't know if anyone who looks at my photos understands this. The data says people rewatch them. They don't skip. They come back. They exit the app after viewing, which means I was the reason they opened it. But nobody says anything. Nobody comments. Nobody sends a message that matches the weight of what I'm trying to show them.

And maybe that's fine. Maybe worship is supposed to be quiet. Maybe the silence is the response, and I just have to learn to hear it.

I'll keep going to the Parthenon. I'll keep shooting buildings that weren't designed to be beautiful. I'll keep pairing songs with images until something clicks for someone somewhere in a way I'll never know about.

Because here's the thing about stopping to really look at something: you can't unsee it. Once you notice the light, you notice the light everywhere. Once you see the beauty in a parking lot, every parking lot is a possibility. Once you learn to worship without a church, the whole city becomes sacred.

And I live here. Every day. One mile from downtown. In a historic building with gorgeous architecture. In a city I forget to be grateful for until I point my camera at it and remember.

I stop and I really look.

That's all any of this is.