The Book of Miracles

This submission is part of a series exploring grief and devastation. Images hold the charge of revelation, not in what they show, but in their capacity to make wonder visible.

Drawing on David Levi-Strauss’s (Photography and Belief, 2020) investigations on whether belief is implicated in how we perceive images, I present a selection of images as a theological sequence of the landscape transformed into a field of apparition where every natural occurrence is potentially supernatural.

Captured on film in 2024and 2025 in Iceland and Spain, the images reference the mid-16th century Augsburg Book of Miracles. The Book of Miracles is an account of a time when many were gripped by the conviction celestial and terrestrial occurrences – strange fauna, meteor showers, volcanic eruptions – were deific omens of impending doom. Created as a warning, and a consolation, the illustrations hover between magic, terror of cataclysmic prophecies and scientific curiosity to document unexplained phenomena and rationalise the world.

The images can be read as panels in a contemporary manuscript that echo the triptych of belief set out in the Book of Miracles - portent, disaster and salvation – using the camera to conceptualise revelation, uncertainty and renewed faith in a continuous cycle of emergence, movement and stillness.

The Sign: In the Book of Genesis, the Creator set the rainbow in the sky as pledge to allow the earth to thrive. (Noahic Covenant, Gen. 9:9 -13). Thus, rainbows are symbols of hope, covenants of divine proof, but they are also portals into the unknown. In the Book of Miracles, fiery skies and celestial arches herald cosmic upheavals. Fiery skies, apocalyptic warmth and celestial arches herald cosmic upheavals. The bronze mountain rises as an altar and the light performs an ominous liturgy of revelation.

A Rehearsal: The horizon, suspended, dissolves into an echo, sky and earth twinned in otherworldly symmetry. This eerie equilibrium foreshadows a visitation, the trembling moment when the natural law holds its breath, revealing an alternative dimension as a form of prophecy. In the Book of Miracles, celestial omens presage judgement. Here, the augury is gentler. we are simply seeing the world twice.

The Cauldron: There is something of John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1851-53). The red (devastation), the green moss (regenerative earth), the droplets (transformation) and the cloud of white (possibility) materialise into a moment of revelation, the steam is the veil, a threshold where knowing ends and faith begins. The natural world becomes ungraspable, too alive. Destruction and re-birth bring humanity a new set of possibilities.

The Crisis: A crack in the land, a fracture in the world. The sky reflected in the icy waters, is a surface of illusion, distorting and replacing substance. To look down is to doubt, since water as depth is uncertainty. Fissures (the boundary) and floods (the aftermath) point to the instability of a world that deviates from an unearthly ideal. Faith enters where proof fails.

The Beast: In the Book of Miracles groups of onlookers turn to the skies looking for omens. The image believes in us, manifesting the idea that photography, like faith, is a negotiation between doubt and hope, the very thing that holds us to the world. The flock behold and trust, they’re part of something grander and more mysterious than life as mere farmhands. They strip belief down to an instinctual form, re-enchanting the landscape through creed.

The Promise: An image that folds inward into earthly abundance. Clustered orbs pulse like votive candles. In Renaissance naturalism, fruit symbolises a blessed promise – a sweetness for constancy, duty and labour, an illumination that springs from the shadows. This is the miracle of incarnation, the divine materialised as nourishment, the infinite condensed into matter.

The Veil: An ethereal landscape bathed in soft golden hues. The dreaminess ought to suggest a sense of calm, but as the growing fog and shadows swallow the landscape, we wonder. The sense of being lost in an indistinct, shifting reality begins to take hold. What is wondrous here is not what is seen, but what is withheld. The visible is only a thin membrane over something infinite and the supernatural hides in the uncertain moment when form trembles into disappearance.

DOG: In the Book of Miracles, birds are shown fallen and lifeless, though no storm nor hunter is seen. Such signs were taken as a warning, that the air itself had grown corrupt, and that great disorder was soon to follow. Here sits a dog, head bent toward the earth, as if struck by fear or shame.

The Silence: Voids signal the barrenness before creation - or an obliterated vacuum waiting to begin anew. This silent vastness scoured by light and bleached by snow hums with latent power. Only the faintest trace of the riverbed remains as a memory and a marker. What feels divine is the expanse of nothingness, an overwhelming divine indifference to human affairs.