In December 2024 I spent eighteen days on a Franciscan pilgrimage through Spain, France and Portugal, led by Fr John-Paul Tan OFM. I went as one of the group, with a camera, which is a different job from going as a photographer.
It was called Sequela Christi — the following of Christ — and it was exactly what the name says: a route built around places rather than sights, with Mass said somewhere every day.
The route
Barcelona, Montserrat, Lourdes, Loyola, Arantzazu, San Sebastián, Burgos, Ávila, Alba de Tormes, Segovia, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, Porto, Fátima, Nazaré, Sintra, Lisbon. Fifteen daily galleries, December 2024, in the kind of northern winter light that arrives late and leaves early and is the best thing that can happen to a photographer in a stone building.
The rule I set myself was simple and I broke it constantly: photograph the people, not the architecture. Every cathedral on that route has been photographed better than I am going to photograph it, by someone with a tripod and permission and a whole morning. Nobody else was photographing the people I was standing next to.
Santiago
Day twelve. The end of the road for people who have walked for weeks, and the middle of the trip for us, which is an odd position to photograph from. The square outside fills with arrivals who have earned the moment in a way a coach passenger has not.
Inside, the frames I kept are of the room doing its work: the great censer hanging on its rope in the crossing, and the star set into the floor with boots standing round it. You do not photograph belief. You photograph what people stand near, and let the reader do the rest.
The market
Then, ten minutes from the cathedral, the food market: octopus, barnacles, and a fishmonger holding up a spider crab for the camera with the expression of a man who has done it before and will do it again after lunch.
That frame is in the set on purpose. A pilgrimage is not fifteen days of solemnity. It is mostly walking, queueing, eating and being cold, with a few minutes of the other thing, and a set that shows only the few minutes is a lie about the fortnight.
What I keep going back to
Of the fifteen galleries, the ones I open again are not the cathedral interiors. They are the ordinary hours around them — the market at lunchtime, candles nobody was watching, the last light on a façade at the end of the day.
It took most of the fortnight to work that out, which is the usual way of it.
The Santiago gallery, and the other fourteen days, are on SmugMug.