a ribbon and a prayer

The project shows how places formerly destined for working, trading, entertaining have been transformed into houses of God, through couple of images: one turned into guide color of the religion, the other one about the inside as an altar.

Massimiliano Camellini's photographic investigation takes its lens to all religious denominations, from Hinduism to Catholicism, from evangelical Christianity to Pentecostalism, from Islam to the Sikh faith, from Shintoism to Buddhism, and many more. His camera unveils little worlds hidden from most people's gaze: a Hindu temple behind an unsightly abandoned depot; a pair of shoes neatly placed outside the entrance to a Muslim prayer room within an old industrial building; the richly-decorated altar screen and brass chandelier of a Moldovan church behind the blinds of an ex-butcher’s; the spacious halls of worship of the Pentecostal congregations and their clinical functional aesthetic. First started in 2017, the photography project now mainly focuses on Europe, but the plan is to extend it to the other continents in the near future. It portrays all the faiths on the planet and hopes to serve as anthropological research through imagery on the evolving nature of spaces and common objects in places of worship. This series of photos is grouped into a couple for each place; a background image which shows the outside (and past) of the premises shot with an “emblematic” shade for each religion, then there is another picture framed inside the previous one or shown as an altar in front of it which reveals the inside (and the present) where, as the title states, “a ribbon and a prayer” have changed the function of these places and reworked their appearance in the process.