Featured Image © Jan Cylwik

The theme for this meeting was “Faith”, with the option to show Personal Projects.

Nusse started the evening with images of big and dramatic skies from London, Norway and Egypt, as part of an ongoing personal project.

The theme of Faith started with a series of images from Jim Paterson, taken in India and related to the Hinduism – a wedding, a temple, shrines and pilgrimage, with the coconut representing fertility and the shaven head a rite of passage for both boys and girls.

By contrast, Prodeepta Das chose to represent many different faiths, from the Baul singers of Bangladesh and the mystic Sufi singers of Lahore to a woman in Enfield whose faith is in children and a performance poet whose work galvanises the creativity of otherwise destructive young people.

Jan Cylwik showed images taken at Lalibela in Ethiopia which practices timeless and deeply-rooted Orthodox Christianity, with two fine portraits of the priest, elegant and strong but modest with a sideways glance.

Mark Friend, new to the group, created a story around Westminster Cathedral and its visitors, seeking out the ‘decisive moment’.

Janet Nabney returned to her approach of fragmenting religious buildings into a series of images, Hockney-style, which she interleaves and connects with drawn outlines, reflecting the layers of history.

Austin Guest presented a lovely set of images of All Saints Church in Tudeley, Kent where the great Russian-French artist Marc Chagall’s twelve stained glass windows include a memorial tribute to a young woman who lost her life in a sailing accident.

Anna Lerner presented the spire of St Andrew’s church near where she lives almost as a prop, creating a tenuous connection but also a sense of place – something from the past looking back at us.

Sally Lyall Grant contrasted the graffiti-covered modern entrance to a Greek Church with the elegant adobe Great Mosque of Djenne in Mali, on a site dating back to the 13^th century.

Andy Schneider explored faith in capitalism and the ‘infallibility’ of the market, with an ironic ‘altar’ to its high priests: Murray Rothbard, Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

As an atheist, faith is not a concept  Sue Czapska relates to, so instead she pays homage to nature and to the growth and mortality of plants; in one of her images she manipulates and replicates the image of a single leaf to form an abstract triptych and altar piece.