Psalm 112—Artwork

Learn more about Christ in the Psalms weekly artwork and see previous pieces here.

Person: Taylor Powers

Taylor is a photographer who grew up in the small mountain town of Woodland Park, CO. She has been working with different types of film for over a decade, and is drawn to the slower pace and unpredictability of the medium more and more.

Piece: Film (35mm)

My goal with this piece was to visually represent how perfect righteousness is ultimately unobtainable through our efforts alone. How does righteousness look through the lens of our sinful nature? I wanted to show an object that represents righteousness to me and ultimately highlight our need for a Savior who is perfectly righteous.

We make an effort to live like the righteous people described in this passage; we strive to be steadfast, firm in our faith, unshaken in our trust in the Lord. The strong language in this Psalm reminded me of the idea of a large boulder, signifying a steady, secure, unwavering presence. In this piece, the original subject of the boulder never changes, even though the pieces are broken and the efforts to reassemble them aren’t aligning quite right. The rock is still the rock, it doesn’t change or shift or move. Our perception of the boulder can adjust and shift based on our current circumstance, conditional. This imagery is obviously falling short of a perfect representation of the original boulder.

Even though the broken pieces can never be a perfect image of the original subject, you can still get an idea of the boulder’s nature and appreciate all that it represents. The broken pieces can still be formed into something that feels like a glimpse into what righteousness is, even though it’s a flawed picture. In the end, the rock is still the rock, it doesn’t change or shift or move regardless of how we are seeing it.

For this piece I used expired 35mm film and an older film camera with a broken light meter, in order to have little control in the process of photographing the actual boulder. I worked to create the original images in a way that had little clarity or direction, it was a guessing game to see where each frame would land in the final layout. The prints of the images were cut into smaller sections, and I did my best to piece them back together to recreate an image of the original boulder.