All ye faithful
Christopher Allen writes in The Australian:
Images of religious festivals show the value of the shared cultural experience.
There is a particularly memorable photograph in the Museum of Sydney’s Rituals and Traditions exhibition.
It shows two girls attending a Russian Orthodox midnight mass. They are standing in an upper gallery of the church looking down at the procession, past a forest of candles and surrounded by religious imagery painted on the walls. What is striking is not so much any overt piety in their attitudes and expression but simply a quiet attention, a kind of stillness and presence.