For 30 years, Linda Connor has roamed the world searching for the
sacred, and Odyssey, her retrospective show at the Center for
Creative Photography, testifies to her geographic—and
religious—reach.

She has aimed her large-format camera at holy places in Cambodia,
Thailand, Ethiopia, Turkey, Utah, France, Hawaii, Peru and Egypt, not
to mention Indonesia, Japan, Zimbabwe and Nepal. A longtime professor
at the San Francisco Art Institute, Connor has photographed Native
American petroglyphs, candles glowing in the cathedral at Chartres and
low-relief carvings in Egyptian tombs.

Connor’s photographs record a variety of religious practices and
sacred sites, from monasteries high in the Himalayas to Hawaiian
carvings on volcanic rock. But her project is not anthropological. What
she’s really trying for is a sense of mystery and transcendence. As she
puts it in a conversation in the exhibition catalog, her meditative
works are “an attempt to point toward the unfathomable … to suggest
the indescribable.”

The images are still and hushed, and often unpeopled, or very nearly
so. “Lamayuru, Ladakh, India,” 1985, is a village carved into a
mountainside. White-rock buildings in a dense urban settlement in the
middle of nowhere have been shot from on high. Connor, casting her lens
down on the tangle of white-rock buildings and courtyards, finds only a
few dark-clad figures in the narrow streets.

“In the Shadow of the Pyramid,” Egypt, 1989, she finds an intimate
moment in a panoramic landscape. Her view of the pyramid is fragmented,
askew and dark. A lone figure kneels on the slope, curving diagonally
down from the giant tomb.

Often, she concentrates on nature as much as architecture.
“Petroglyphs, PuuLoa, Hawaii,” 1986, searches out the drawings etched
into rock, but these human marks—a stick man, a triangular
woman—are only a tiny element in a wide-open lava-scape.
Similarly, at a petroglyph site in Bluff, Iowa, a row of little
chiseled hands and dots are miniscule in a landscape of cascading rock
(“Dots and Hands II, Fourteen Window Ruin,” 2000).

Another Hawaiian image, from O’Hia in 1997, is pure nature, a lovely
look at tree branches scraping against the sky. The photographer must
have lain down on the ground beneath the trees, and looked up at the
heavens with her viewfinder.

Connor uses an old-fashioned, large-format camera with 8-by-10
negatives. The big camera, which she’s lugged through airports and
along remote trails all over the world, allows her a contradictory
luxury: sweeping views as well as extraordinary details. Back home, she
does direct contact printing, putting her negatives on printing paper
outside in her garden and exposing them to the light of the sun. Toned
with gold chloride, and printed in a warm black that’s almost sepia,
the pictures seem to have captured the sun’s rays.

The galleries of the CCP have been transformed for the occasion,
with the white walls painted black, and partitions put up to divide the
big space into small, cavelike rooms. The photos glisten on the walls
like votive objects in a chapel. The viewer can move through the silent
rooms in a kind of processional, a walking meditation.

The final rooms open up again into brilliant white to show some of
Connor’s experiments with new technology. A selection of the older,
small negatives—mostly of rocky mountains where vegetation is
sparse—have been digitized and printed in a large format in an
inkjet printer. The detail is astonishing: Every crumbling stone is
visible. To my eye, though, they lose the warmth of the earlier glowing
pieces. Their blinding black and white made me want to scurry back to
the dark cave.

She’s especially skilled at picturing light, capturing it from
reality and deploying it metaphorically. (In the catalog, writer
William L. Fox notes her preoccupation with “how light is received from
the heavens.”) In “Votive Candles, Chartres Cathedral, France,” 1989,
hundreds of flames flicker in the darkness, a choir of candles dancing
for the Lord.

Some of her sacred subjects are not unexpected for a project of this
sort. A giant carved head from the temple in Angkor Thom, Cambodia,
1999, is beautiful but familiar, and so is the charming crocodile
chiseled into the side of a tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, 1989.
But many are surprising. The Christian rites Connor photographed in
Ethiopia, for instance, are little-known in the Western world, and her
pictures are stunning.

In “Funeral,” Ethiopia, 2006, white-robed mourners are conducting a
service in the open air near towering trees, on an earth floor lush
with grasses and plants. Connor has pointed her camera through the
natural bower, so the participants are glimpsed only belatedly through
the trunks and branches. The living and the dead are at one with
nature. The mysterious “Mass, St. George’s Church, Ethiopia,” 2006, has
a giant hole carefully dug in the ground; inside, rising up to the
level of the earth, is a giant cross lying horizontally.

Connor occasionally turns from religious monuments and gives full
attention to the humans who made them. Her portraits are radiant.

“Sloe-Eyed Girl, Egypt,” 1989, places a young girl in her own
familiar haunts, on a dirt road near a rock wall, in front of a weedy
tree. Dressed in an ankle-length dress, she stares steadily at the
photographer with her dark eyes. She clutches a taut rope that extends
out of the picture frame. A stubborn animal apparently is pulling on
its leash. Connor’s choice to leave the creature out of the image is
funny, setting up a guessing game about the girl’s occupation. But the
animal’s absence also leaves a viewer’s full attention on the girl.

In another “environmental portrait,” a blind musician plays a sitar,
sitting outdoors on a plank floor in Kashmir, India, in 1985. His eyes
are blank, but his face expresses his peaceful spirit, his oneness with
his music. Sometimes, Connor singles out body parts, like a new baby’s
pure, unused feet in “Baby Feet, Hawaii,” 1978, or, in “Mudra,
Mindroling Monastery, Tibet,” 1993, the hands of a gleaming statue,
curved into a prayerful gesture.

And Connor doesn’t shy away from finding the holy in the everyday.
“Woman Winnowing Wheat, Turkey,” 1992, captures a peasant performing a
never-ending task. She raises a basket high above her head, and bending
her body slightly, she pours the wheat into a pile on the ground,
separating it from the chaff. She’ll do it again, and again, and again,
her repetitive motion a daily prayer of love and care for her
family.

This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.