Architectural Photography

 

The Beautiful Home, Architectural Photography

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Seldom do we pause to consider the stream of beauty that enters our eyes.  We forget that we spin upon the Earth at 1,000 miles per hour while we hurtle through a universe expanding in a comprehension of details almost impossible to consider.  Before us, God’s beauty, and man’s beauty, which is also God’s beauty.  The more God-like our things, the more beautiful in the way of God.  As you see.

There are many ways of seeing, through love and hatred, through glasses and machines.  We all see same things differently because we differ in focus and need.  We focus on what most we need.  The aesthete needs beauty more than a meal.  Doubt me?  Ask an aesthete.  Beauty is a need and a necessity, as Wilde observes in his painfully beautiful novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray:

 

 

“People say sometimes that Beauty is superficial.  That may be so.  But at least it is not so superficial as Thought is.  To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders.  It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.  The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

Architectural photography is the mystery of the visible revealed.  Order, reason, meter, balance, all that keeps the universe strung in high pitch is found in sound building.  The best of sound buildings, the sacred.  From Pericles’ Athena Parthenos through Constantine’s Great Church (Hagia Sophia) to Pope Julius’ Saint Peter’s Cathedral, to your local church of Jesus and neighbors.  Each church is a home suitable to God the humble and to God the Magnificent.  Good architectural photography helps us to see beauty in both the magnificent and the humble.

 

 

As you will guess, in studies for The Beautiful Home I make photographs, choices in composition, some to tell details, some to tell stories, some to comprehend magnificence.  This first collection of Beautiful Home Architectural Photography dilates on the architecture of Christendom, the shrines, churches, basilicas, cathedrals that encompasses the community of Christians world round.

As you know, we are passing into a post-Christian era, an era vicious, angry, envious, conditions that were common to all the world before the sacrifice of Christ.  Pictures remember for us what is passing, past, and is no more, as in the Egyptian pictograph.  How much of Christendom will die before Christ’s Second Coming, I cannot say; yet as you see, the Christian world is descending into decay and flame.

 

Each year in France, hundreds of churches are vandalized or torched; as in 2018, there were 877 attacks on Catholic churches, very many by the New French imported from lands south and near east.  You will recall the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris five years ago, and perhaps you have heard that the church famous to you by Monet’s many paintings, Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, the Cathedral of Rouen, was burned last week (24-07-11).  As with over 90 percent of these burnings, the cause is suspicious, under investigation.

You might like to know, for several years, 1876-1880, the Rouen Cathedral was the tallest building in the world; that Notre Dame translates, “Our Lady” (the Virgin Mary); that every two weeks a French church is entirely enveloped in flame; that those who see recognize the final solution of De-Christianization begun during the bloody, destructive, liberal French Revolution, 1789.

Yes, passing, past, forgotten, as in Canada where over 100 Christian churches were burned or defaced between June and July 2021, a pace that is sometimes on the decrease, sometimes on the increase, a pace seldom fast enough for Progressives as with impatient Harsha Walia, executive director of British Columbia’s Civil Liberties Association, who said, “burn it all down.”  There is no single cause for the burnings except for an envy and hatred that wants only a spurious report as call to action, as there the lie that Catholics officially murdered children.

In our United States, churches, basilicas, cathedrals are sold to settle lawsuits against queer, often prideful priests.  The Diocese of Buffalo has abandoned half its churches, the majority of its congregation, and has betrayed every parishioner who gave the reward of his labor to worshipfully fund the building of God’s magnificent houses and the beautiful sacred objects.  Some of these churches, when not razed, are repurposed as nightclubs, boutiques, and pop-up temples to Satan.

 

 

Though passing, Christendom is not yet past, and might yet return to health if the Classive will oppose the Progressive.  If not, well, the churches not put to flame and Satan will merely decay or be replaced by the ugly Modern, those crooked church buildings daily abandoned by exhausted, flummoxed Catholics who cannot resolve the dilemma of reconciling the Catholic with the Progressive.  The Classive Catholic (the Christian) and the Progressive cannot be reconciled, they are different things.  The Classive is spiritual, the Progressive is material, the Classive is honorable, beautiful and eternal; the Progressive is ugly, mechanical and expedient.

It seems that each year there is more ugliness, less beauty.  You know this to be true.  And you know that this nation is failing because we have neglected God.  If the whole of us do not repent, well, you know what comes after.  It has been said by who-knows-who, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of ugliness is for good men to do nothing,” a quote often wishfully attributed to Oscar Wilde.

 

 

Oscar Wilde, a genius, an aesthete, a man with visions of the real who could see the invisible, a man who repented.  Didn’t you know, the great Oscar Wilde repented his sins of the flesh, his sins against family, pleading for years to be accepted into the bosom of the Church, and in the cradle of his deathbed was baptized into the Catholic Church by Father Cuthbert Dunne, a fellow Irishman:

“…he understood me when told that I was about to receive him into the Catholic Church and gave him the Last Sacraments… And when I repeated close to his ear the Holy Names, the Acts of Contrition, Faith, Hope and Charity, with acts of humble resignation to the Will of God, he tried all through to say the words after me.”

 

Because pressing, needful in the recording of Catholic churches before destruction, this first collection of Beautiful Home Architectural Photography features the architecture of Christendom.  The collection includes 24 images of Sacred Architecture, its art, interiors, and settings.  Printed on durable metal (unframed and suitable for hanging), prints are offered in various sizes depending on composition (wide-angle, rectangle, et cetera).

Twice yearly (June and December), The Beautiful Home will offer themed collections from which one, several, or many metal prints can be ordered.  Upcoming collections include Greece, December 2024; Italy, June 2025; Williamsburg, December 2025.  The Sacred Architecture Collection, as with each collection, will be augmented when some new, beautiful photograph is made.

You can find the Sacred Architecture collection and many other beautiful works of art at MichaelJCurtis.com.

 

 

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ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Architectural Photography featured image, Church of Saint Ignatius Loyola, New York. credit: M. Curtis

The Beautiful Home

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