Joshua Cavalier - He asked if I was looking for God
These photographs are pulled from my first photobook "He asked if I was looking for God." The title references a question that an evangelist asked me while I was photographing a lovely coincidence of colour, shapes and shadows in a park. I was raised in perhaps one too many denominations of Christianity, and now identify as agnostic, though I never dropped my association between divinity and beauty. I have documented that changing relationship through my images as best I can. I believe beauty requires a witness — an observer to organize the chaos of the material world into arrangements of aesthetics and goodness.
From life’s most mechanical experiences, the conscious observer composes meaning. We learn from mistakes and mistrials. Failures and accidents become stencils around which we trace new futures. Friendships and lovers come and go, and are the punctuation marks that give our sentences weight and power. Like the accident of shapes and colours that struck the sidewalk of the park that day, the circumstances of our lives occasionally line up for a marvellous instant and allow us — ever so briefly — to commune with true wonder. Thanks to my camera, I find that even the smallest of coincidences appears marvellous still. Everything beautiful is at least in some part an accident.