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I was sad to say goodbye to one of my favourite photo-weaves last week but also very happy it has been collected by a good person who understands that landscapes are accumulations of both soil and story.

When people think of Scotland, they generally imagine hills, deer and rivers, but also textiles: tartan and tweed. Since the country was rebranded in t…

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Knowing that red hair is a recessive gene, I did not think, with my Native American roots and their dad’s African American roots, that Jaxston would be born with red hair. But he was.

I was told that his hair would change once he got older, but I knew that wasn’t the case, because when he was born, his eye…

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Los Angeles is a grid of neighbourhoods, connected and disconnected by roads.

Writer Dorothy Parker once described LA as “72 suburbs in search of a city”. Rapper Ice-T said the city is “a microcosm of the United States. If LA falls, the country falls.” Personally, I find cultural theorist Christian Gonzalez Ho’s description to be the most helpful. He see…

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When I first read Judith Herrin’s book Byzantium, I felt a longing, a kind of homesickness for a place I had not been. What Germans would call Sehnsucht. Then, standing with Judith in churches in Ravenna, Italy, I experienced the Byzantine Empire for the first time.

Ravenna was once the seat of the Byzantine government in what is now Italy (the Western Roman Empire), and in the sixth century its bishops began building churches. Some of these incredible buildings, including the Basilica of San Vitale (above) and the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, remain, and offer a direct experience of the glorious architecture and decorative arts of the empire. Go to Ravenna before you die, I beg you.

This week, I once again experienced profound beauty in a 21st-century portal to Byzantium found in an unexpected place – Southern California.

Cavalry Chapel is on the campus of a modern evangelical university, Biola, and was transformed in 2018 by two of Denmark’s greatest artists, Maja Lisa Englehardt and the late Peter Brandes. Inside is Englehardt’s incredible relief wall of the Resurrection, a golden grid made by hand-carving five tons of clay, casting them in plaster and overlaying the plaster with gold.

So great is this wall of gold that the late Byzantine scholar Alexei Lidov, I am reliably informed, sat quietly in front of it for an hour, before announcing- Byzantium had come to the 21st century!

Inserted into the thin gaps between sections are prayers from students, a spontaneous gesture, the impact of which grows each semester.

I knelt before the wall: I am a photographer, and we contort ourselves for the best pictures. To photograph such beauty is both simple and difficult. Simple in that the main subject is obvious. The difficulty comes in trying to capture the experience of how the photographer feels experiencing it.

The turning point was the moment I switched off the lights and let the slotted side windows (covered in Brandes’s stunning stained glass) cast Californian sunset light across its surface. I was no longer in La Mirada but transported to Ravenna, where I had spent sunrise and sunset in churches, waiting for the mosaics to come alive.

Photographers salivate over the golden hour, the two hours after sunrise and before sunset when light and life feels more present. I call it eternal light. Something special happens in that light that transcends time and space. Yet I remain there: it’s as if I am more there, in fact. Awakened into that moment.

I do not believe any space on earth is more sacred than other, but some places, like Ravenna, like the Cavalry Chapel, seem better than others at offering a portal to another dimension, one separate to space and time, and perhaps outside of everything entirely bathed in that light of all light.

Weather updates first

Scotland is very cold and wet at the moment. I had not seen a day of sunshine for weeks, and that is not hyperbole. No, it’s not Arctic cold or monsoon wet: it’s worse! Ask people from across the world who live here, and they’ll agree it’s a special kind of cold. A chill-to-the-bone dampness that makes you want to fell the majestic …

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(For a more in-depth interview with me about my career, have a listen to the most recent Exhibiting Faith podca…

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Today is Blue Monday, the saddest day of the year, a day invented by marketeers to comfort us with discount codes. But I feel there is only one true consolation to the post-festive slump: fluffy animals in cute coats.

I was in New York City recently to discuss lofty ideas of heaven being revealed in art. But considering the heavenly seemed to make me fee…

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Here is the first preview from recent journeys in the US for paid subscribers. While news fixates on the big political heists, I stay focused on the common life, the daily things that significantly define our existence. Both perspecti…

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Does anyone give thanks for the spiritual gift of administration? Maybe I should.

In most documentaries I see, Christianity appears weird and dramatic. Filmmakers generally like to focus on visually arresting scenes such as people being ‘slain’ by the spirit, speaking in tongues or g…

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Only one in every 100,000 grey squirre…

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This weirdly tall panorama photograph was beamed from NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover as it humble-bragged its interplanetary exploits. Look, earthlings! I made tyre tracks on Mars! The tonal depth and resolution seem so familiar that the image resembles an iPhone snap.

You can almost feel the sand beneath your space boots or the sharp rocks under your squi…

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The Roman Empire faltered at Falkirk. Either the Romans recognised their limits or admitted the barren Highlands weren’t worth conquering. The final frontier runs not along Hadrian’s famous wall (begun in 122 AD) but sixty miles north at the 40-mile-long Antonine Wall (begun in 142AD). A few forward camps and ‘Glen-blocker’ forts are found at the distan…

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Imagine you’re a professional footballer, dribbling the ball towards an open goal. Would you pause to ponder how scoring might help your retirement plans? Of course not. The point of football is to play the game, which is to score goals. To play well you must focus on what is happening on the pitch.

At the heart of creative work too is play. The focus is…

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Photographers have always been tempted to clean up their viewpoint. Nowadays, some phone cameras will quickly remove mess and messy people on your behalf.

But after photographing many holy sites, it finally dawned on me, as I tried (in vain) to exclude the evidence of mai…

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Each interview I made with the sitters requires transcription and editing for sense and concision. And choosing images takes longer than you might imagine. But luckily there is a deadline to spur me on.

In 2026, I aim to release a new book: Gingers of America. I don’t know how exactly but I have the portraits.

For now, here is a sneak peek of a wonderful couple of people I met in Alabama.

Tracey and Alannah Rae White, Alabama

Tracey: We are from here in Birmingham, Alabama. Alannah is my granddaughter. I think the nurse’s first statement about her was, “Oh my, her hair’s blonde,” because it did look blonde initially. And that was a little shock. Mostly our family is African American. My nieces, my brother’s girls, have different moms, but both nieces have red hair. And they each have a baby boy with red hair.

So I started looking into our ancestry. It’s African, a small amount of Irish, and a very minute amount of Indonesian. It was hard to trace my father’s side, which I think is where the red hair comes from. My grandmother on my father’s side had red hair. Everybody we knew of was from the South. I’ve been in Alabama all my life and before that the family were in different states, but mostly Alabama.

Alannah: Mom’s hair used to be brown but then she put something in it and it got darker and darker and darker.

Tracey: We know her dad is from Alabama, but not here in Birmingham. He’s Caucasian and his hair is brown. I did see an older picture of him before he cut his beard, and I thought it had a little red in it.

Growing up, my daughter’s hair was a kind of sandy-looking color: you would think it was dirty, but it wasn’t. That was just the color it was, and now it’s black. She’s working a lot so I just take care of Alannah most of the time anyway. I take her tumbling, to you know, piano, whatever she’s doing. Alabama has a lot of Southern history, some good, some bad, but also a lot of hospitality, a lot of good home-cooked Southern food, and mostly polite people.

More soon!

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