Red Church (1976)

Overview

“I wanted to make a sequel to Chants…the gold against black, but I wasn’t quite sure how. One day I went to St Mary’s Cathedral here in Sydney. After looking at the stained glass windows for some time, on the way out I noticed that they were selling slides of the interior…and whoever photographed the stained glass had used a red filter. This was the image I was after…red against black. By simply photographing and rephotographing the slide (up to 200 times, in some cases)…and varying the exposure by changing the distance between the light source and the slide, I was able to give the feeling of looking up…which is what you do in a church…from the knave up to the stained glass up to the ceiling…up to heaven in this red light. The upward motion was layered without visible edits by superimposing strips of the varyingly exposed film, in the lab.” (Paul Winkler)