In the interests of full disclosure I should point out that I was raised as a Catholic. When I was growing up I knew nothing of the industrial scale abuse of children by the clergy in Ireland, never mind globally. Nor did I know about the pregnant girls who were virtually imprisoned as slave labourers in the infamous 'laundries.' 

 

I was, however, aware of the suffocating miasma of prudery and censorship which pervaded life in Ireland and which was enthusiastically orchestrated by the clergy. One example will suffice to give you the flavour of the times. In Mike Nicholl's brilliant film, The Graduate, there is a scene where Mrs Robinson is putting on a stocking in front of the hapless protagonist Ben.

 

The Irish censor deleted this short scene as well as a later one in which Ben brandished a crucifix. All this, mind you, at a time when no altar boy could feel entirely safe in the sacristy and the Vatican was moving sexual predator priests from parish to parish in the desperate hope that nobody would notice these monsters and their predeliction for paedophilia carefully concealed behind their starched white collars.  

 

"Oh that nice new priest Father Flaherty announced in his sermon last Sunday that he's willing to help any young girls with their applications to join the Blessed Sodality of Virgins Against Pre-marital Sex. He'll see girls individually after Mass next Sunday. He said he's hoping to find even more virgins than in his last parish."

 

As I grew older I became increasingly uncomfortable with the interior decoration idiom of Catholic churches.  The most prominent object in all Catholic churches is the detailed and often gruesome depiction of a man with long nails driven through his feet and hands, bleeding from head wounds and a spear wound in his side in the process of suffering an unimaginably agonizing death from slow asphyxiation. Except it's not unimaginable because religious artists seem to revel in emphasising every last laceration and contorted muscle of a semi-naked corpse hanging from a cross.

 

All of my disquiet at this iconography was neatly summarized in an incident I witnessed today in the Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta in Venice. The Church is famous for its extraordinary marble decoration but tucked away in a quiet corner was a large crucifix. I was photographing this object when a young girl and her parents approached. I could hear them explain that the man on the cross had been a very good man but that he had been killed by people who didn't like him.  There was a moment of silence as the girl contemplated the cross. Then she turned to her parents and uttered just one word. "Why?"     

 

I knew I had a very limited time to take the image and had to quickly manoeuvre myself to a viewpoint that made the composition work. I recited internally the photographer's litany. "Check the edges and the corners. Check the height of the camera. Check nothing is obscuring the main elements. Check for shadows. Check the aperture. Check the focus".

 

You know, of course, that nothing remotely like that was going through my mind, When you are about to take a photograph you have wanted to take all your life you just pray and press the shutter. Some images are made because an almost impossible set of circumstances come together for a very brief moment and the photographer is lucky enough to be there to capture it. 

 

I very much doubt that I shall ever be as lucky again. This is a special photograph for me.