New York, USA - Sam Fentress has spent the past 25 years crisscrossing America's highways and byways, stopping along the way to snap shots of religious signs in every state except Hawaii. He found everything from John 3:3 on a farm silo in Ohio to "Obey God or Burn" scratched into a rock in Harlem.
Together, his photographs capture the gamut of Christian religious expression in America. Now, nearly 150 of those images are collected in his recent book, Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape.
The story of his images — thousands collected over a lifetime — begins with Fentress' religious and intellectual experiences in college.
Fentress, 52, was raised a Methodist in Nashville, but by the time he attended Princeton University, he had fallen away from his faith and was more interested in yoga, Taoism and Jack Kerouac.
"Everything," he said, "except reading the Bible."
But a class on the philosophy of religion with Walter Kaufmann, the noted scholar and Nietzsche translator, piqued Fentress' interest in religion and got him reading the Bible again. While he was teaching after graduate school, a student brought in a photograph of a barn covered in Scripture verses. Fentress was stunned.
"It just knocked my socks off as a picture," he said. "The boldness of the farmer in covering the roof, the sides — every square foot of the barn had some sort of Bible quote, Old Testament, New Testament, Gospels, Epistles, Revelation."
At some point in the late '70s or early '80s, Fentress noticed the farmer wasn't alone. Wherever he looked, he saw religious signs along the roadside. He started to methodically photograph thousands of such images over the next two decades. Somewhere along the line, he also became a Catholic.
Fentress has Master of Arts degree from the Art Institute of Chicago and his work is collected by museums, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the St. Louis Art Museum.
Fentress says the religious roadside signage is particularly American, given the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and religion and the country's religious diversity.
"Americans are told they can say whatever they want," he said. And people feel free to say it — or perhaps, show it — whether on their front lawn, barn or business.
Fentress said he was intrigued by the juxtaposition of landscape and religious message. Some of his images capture signs on businesses, which he attributed to a capitalist tendency to co-opt religion into something that can be marketed and sold. But he also recognized the religious impulse to spread the good news wherever possible.
In Las Vegas, he spotted Glorified Bodies Inc., a collision repair shop with the Christian fish symbol on its sign post. He noted the relationship between Jesus' resurrected body, as described in the New Testament, and restoring damaged cars.
Other times, the messages work in opposition. One of Fentress' favorite photographs is Matthew 6:33 stenciled on the window of a beauty parlor just below a woman with a sassy haircut. He notes that Matthew 6:33 — thick in the middle of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount — actually refers to not worrying about earthly material goods like food, clothing and, presumably, haircuts, he said.
Fentress said there are more roadside signs per square mile in the South, for example, than the Northeast. When he began the project, Fentress thought the Bible Belt would dominate as a region of religious expression.
"In Vermont, you're not going to have quite the same sort of depth of gutsiness as in Mississippi," he said of his original assumptions.
Nonetheless, he found his images nationwide. Fentress said he thinks of the photographs on an "intensity scale" loosely related to the End Times. In the Northeast, he said, "the flavor of them can be even more intense" than the South, noting the photograph of rocks etched with the words "Obey God or Burn" was found in Harlem, not Mississippi or Tennessee.
What's more, rural areas don't necessarily trump cities for religious expression, he said. He found the most photos near his home in St. Louis; Los Angeles came in second, he said.
Fentress' wife, Elizabeth, and their six children were instrumental in pointing out signs during family road trips. His daughters spotted the image taken closest to home — about 100 yards from the house — of a red car with the Gospel of John written on it.
Fentress said he edited the photos for what was interesting both theologically and aesthetically. Fentress does not see himself as an evangelizer by giving the images a wider audience; he hopes the book will interest believers and non-believers alike.
"I hope it has, at least at the beginning on first look, a sense of being dispassionate and detached and open to whatever belief somebody brings to it," he said. "Here's something that goes on in America in a certain subset of our culture."