The Portrait of Mary Relived

The Portrait of Mary Relived

If you believe, just maybe something good can happen to one’s life. To believe is to have faith.

In the past year I've been following a religious path in my travels and teachings to process symbolic images. There is an old saying about which came first. The chicken or the egg from our childhood. You can ask the same question in regards to the biblical iconic imagery like Michelangelo's Pieta. This is the image of dead Jesus in the arms of Mary. What makes this so interesting to me is that one hundred years after Jesus died. Yet in the fourteenth century people are starting to interpret the the emotion Mary must have felt for her child at death. Michelangelo ends up with an assignment to create a head stone that must be the most beautiful than any thing existing for the tomb of St Peters. Michelangelo interprets the bible and produces The Lamentation of Jesus, which was a popular them in Northern Europe that portrayal of pain. This ideal gives life to the crucifixion. In celebration we now have Holy week. MIchelangelo’s statue is a perfect illustration that tells the story of what could had been a biblical event. Today people who live in a cultures with fewer options in life has kept the stories alive from sermons in church to readings at home with the belief that these things have happened. It is a part of their conviction.

Within the pages of the bible that was first written one hundred years after the death of Jesus, The fourteenth century art interprets to the biblical literate and biblical illiterate of the Lamenting Mary. In times of personal crises biblical art becomes the reference and path way for lamentation and prayer as seem of many people kneeling in prayer.

In my image a real woman with real needs, laments while moving down the isle. She bare’s her incapacitated son in her arms in search for a miracle from her faith.

This series of images is my reportage of truth from within the town of Cartaga where farm workers and people within the town still believe that a miracle, an act from God can happen even as the world changes and still embrace the acts of faith.