The Heat

For both
LexJet and Katzman, the decision to display these images on such grand scale
was almost literally an act of faith. Katzman, who’s relatively new to
computers, ruefully admits that he was learning how to use Spectrum Pro right
up until the day he left Florida for New York City. "It ain’t plug
and play," he joked to me, when he was still in the middle of that learning
curve. "It’s plug, crash and burn."

And, of
course, the project was a leap of faith on an entirely other level.

"When
I began this project, I thought it was somewhat limited in its appeal,"
Katzman says. "Probably because I felt uncomfortable with what I was personally
going through–because I was just uncomfortable with the feelings I was
having. As I started to get more photographs, show them to more people who were
in secular society, I started noticing their reactions. They were very emotional,
because of the strength and impact of the photographs, but also because it was
striking a chord in them. And it was a chord that they realized that they were
not experiencing–that they were really on the outside, looking in, and
felt left out… So I started noticing that there was a bigger audience for
this than just Christian book publishers. That it appeals to everybody who has
a question about faith, a question of themselves. It all gets back to one thing–your
belief."

Katzman,
52, has been based in Sarasota, FL, for some time. But he was born and raised
in Omaha, in a well-to-do Conservative Jewish family.

"During
my growing up, my father was very involved with UJA," he recalls. "That
was during the Six Day War. My grandparents on my father’s side came from
Russia, from the pogroms. My grandparents on my mother’s side were already
here in the States. My mother’s mother, during the Depression, supported
her family by writing pulp fiction."

Katzman
did not expect to become a professional photographer–he’s largely
self-taught, and still admits, despite years of memorable work, to large gaps
in his technical knowledge. He got his degree in political science instead,
from the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, in 1973. At 21, with no formal
background in photography–"Just knew that everything was correct when
the meter setting was correct. Not over, not under, wherever you pointed the
camera, as long as that meter said okay you took the picture."–he
took a camera he barely knew how to use to a reservation of Oneida Indians and
began taking pictures.

"I
stepped out of a motor home. Now, here I am–privileged, white, upper class–stepping
out of a motor home, Indian reservation, dirt, newspaper insulation, no plumbing–and
I was accepted. I was invited to christenings, weddings, outings. From that
point on, I’ve never had a problem gaining access to whatever I photographed.
Maybe it’s a sense of sincerity, a sense of honesty."

Although
his work since has ranged from insightful portraiture to grotesque set-pieces
reminiscent of Joel-Peter Witkin, there’s a strong vein of the sociopolitical
running through it all–an urge to investigate, and understand, and reveal
the outcasts and edges of mainstream society.

There are,
for example, two series of portraits he shot of long-term prison inmates at
the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola and of "cowboy convicts"
at a prison rodeo in McAlester, OK. Prison authorities allowed him only a few
brief minutes alone with each prisoner (with Katzman’s second wife, Sharon,
assisting), but in that extremely limited space the inmates could step outside
of the institutionalized anonymity of prison life–they could, for the shortest
moment, be and reveal themselves as individuals, to someone who was paying them
the closest attention.

The resulting
portraits are almost viscerally intimate. One inmate vamps and vogues like a
pretty woman. At the other end of the machismo spectrum, a tough-looking hombre
pulls down his lower lip to flash a painfully defiant FUCK YOU tattoo inside
his mouth.

Katzman
produced his most challenging and overtly shocking photos for what he calls
simply the Death Series.

"After
the cowboy convicts there was a period where I started to deal in the whole
question of death," he explains. "My wife Sharon lost her brother
and was in mourning, and I hadn’t been around somebody who had been mourning,
other than, say, my parents mourning a parent. She took this very hard. I wanted
to start to try to deal with death pictorially. I think it had to do with my
own personal faith–or rather lack of faith. I had no faith."

He started
with small-d deaths, doing things like arranging the corpses of rats in bizarre
mandalas or sunflower shapes. He went on to pursue death straight to the source,
spending a year and a half photographing the unclaimed corpses of poor John
Does and stillborn babies in morgues and at a crematorium. He went so far as
to shoot the actual cremation process–oven door open, flames engulfing
the corpse and licking the flesh off the bones.

"It
singed my tripod and smoked my lens shade and I got blisters until I used welder’s
gloves," he recalls. Asked how it felt to be watching this gruesome process,
he replies candidly, "It was a total rush. I have never seen or experienced
such concentrated energy. You’ve got the flame over the body, that igniting,
the gas–it was a rush, just an incredible rush. And that’s probably
why I kept shooting it." He adds that as a Jew, naturally, the ovens struck
all sorts of cultural chords as well.

His most
controversial photos to date are Witkinesque tableaux he created with those
dead babies–stillborns he’d found in little pine boxes at the crematorium,
waiting to be incinerated. The most heartbreaking one was the tiny child he
found with a cross of ugly autopsy scars scored into his abdomen and chest.
He posed them with wooden crucifixes, with the wings of a dead bird. Exhibited
in Sarasota, they raised a public furor, some viewers decrying them as exploitation
or desecration, others seeing them as almost religious icons that transcended
the shock value.

Maybe it
was inevitable that Katzman would next be drawn to suggestions of a spiritual
life, and afterlife. His revivalist series–and his own conversion experience–began
simply enough, when he opened a Sarasota newspaper and "I saw this ad that
said ‘Come witness the miracles. The blind see. The crippled walk. Come
to the miracle tent.’ I said, ‘This has gotta be a trip.’"

It was a
traveling fundamentalist revival tent, set up on the parking lot of a Sarasota
sports stadium.

"I
go to the tent. I walk through, I’ve got all my equipment. I’m standing
there, checking out this lousy organ music, and it was just a strange thing…
But one thing I observed was this passion these people had–and it wasn’t
directed at the evangelist–it was directed toward God. I said, ‘How
strange. If I could just have that much passion in my work, I would be so far
ahead of the game.’ … I’m watching this and I’m kind of staying
out of the way. I go in and go out. Then the minister comes over and he says,
‘What are you here for?’ ‘Well, I’m here to take photographs,
and I’m going to give you some of those photographs.’ ‘Well,
that’s great. Praise God!’ And I would always do that. I always give
them photographs of what I have shot. Evidently, they liked to see the spirit
moving in their house."

Despite
having lost touch with his own Jewish faith, Katzman says, his background had
left him supremely suspicious of Christianity and all its trappings–crosses,
the very name of Jesus, all of it. Yet, no doubt precisely because he had drifted
away from his own religious upbringing, he felt powerfully drawn to that revival
tent–and not just as a photographer. The revival went on for a week, "And
I would keep going back, keep going back. I would be getting on with my own
life and I’d be processing the film and I would just be amazed at the results
I would be getting. Seeing the crying, seeing the screaming… This was the
Primal Scream in front of me. I couldn’t believe that I was witnessing
this. Not just once, but in repetitive mode, on call. Gradually you would see
this emotion build up and bang!–they would be on the ground, twitching,
withering, balled up in a fetal position. That’s where you get this whole
concept of rebirth. Being reborn. Because anybody who puts themselves in that
position is going through some change in their life."

Fascinated
both professionally and personally, Katzman continued to research the revivalist
community. In 2000 he took a trip to northern Florida, to the Brownsville Assembly
of God church in Pensacola. As it happened, he gained access there through another
man who’d been raised Jewish but had converted to fundamentalist Christianity
and was now running the church’s school of ministry.

At Brownsville,
church leaders instructed Katzman that he was allowed to shoot "only during
praise and worship" at the beginning of the service, "and you have
to shoot from the outer aisle, and you can’t use flash." Still the
non-techie, he borrowed a 35 mm camera. His unfamiliarity with it would prove
fateful.

"I
get there, and I am immediately entrusted to this woman who’s the church
photographer, Cathy Wood… I start to take photographs, and I’m just amazed
at the sense of power going on during this praise and worship session. I have
never experienced that before. So it comes time for me to rewind the film. The
last 35 mm camera [I had used] had a rewind crank on it, and I’m looking
for the crank. My glasses are in the car, and I don’t know how to get the
film out of the body. And I just drove eight hours to shoot this–and I
was pissed."

Unable to
shoot anymore, he went with Wood up to the church balcony to observe the increasingly
intense activity below as the hours-long revival service cranked into high gear.

"Well,
all of a sudden I realized that one hour turned to three hours, and I was obviously
moved and captivated by what was going on there. And about the fourth hour into
the service, I start hearing this screaming and I hear this shouting and I look
down over the railing and I see another photo-op that obviously I can’t
get for two reasons–(a) I don’t know how to work the camera, and (b)
I don’t have permission. I see bodies just all over the aisle. I see the
eye of the storm. The preacher, Steven Hill, laying hands on people, people
dropping on top of each other, no one’s catching them, screaming, wailing–I
was like, ‘This is so intense!’"

Seeing his
absorption in the scene–and no doubt a chance to win a new soul for the
church–Wood asked him, "‘Would you like to go into that?’
‘Yeah, I would.’ Downstairs, in the main entrance. A couple of ushers.
Double doors slam open. Here comes the storm. Steven Hill. Bang! People around
him dropping like flies. And he comes up to me, and I said to myself, I said
‘Even if he says the J word, I will accept his prayer.’ And he grabs
me and he spends time and he’s praying for me, and all of a sudden I feel
this heat come down from where he’s laying his hand on my head, down my
shoulders, down my hands, and it comes to my knees and I am out on the floor.
And I sit up and I’m crying. I’m sobbing, I’m embarrassed, but
everyone around me is out. They’re out. They can’t see me. Cathy is
out. I’m looking down. And she says, ‘Steven, you’ve gotta let
the Lord work inside of ya.’ I say, ‘No way. I’m out of here.’
I just crawled to a chair and I just sat there and I sobbed. I sobbed for about
five minutes.

"This
is around midnight. Went back to the hotel, following morning, called my wife
and I said, ‘You won’t believe what just happened.’ She said,
‘You did it, didn’t ya?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it was just amazing.’
And Sharon knows enough about me, she said, ‘You have to do this by yourself.
I’ll join you later.’" (Sharon, by the way, was raised a Christian.)

"The
following night I figured out how to rewind the camera… Same thing goes on,
but now I’m not with Cathy, I’m with her best friend… Praise and
worship. Shot a couple of rolls and, I can’t shoot anymore. So I’ve
gotta listen to this sermon… You really can’t take any during the part
where they come up to the ‘blood line’ during confessional, where
they want to be prayed for and ask Jesus for forgiveness."

The theme
of that night’s sermon was "Die Right." As in get your life in
order, right any wrongs you may have done, clean up any messes you may have
left, because you never know when it’s going to end.

"Now
I’m thinking about that," Katzman recalls. "I’m saying,
‘Die right. I could die right, doing what I’m doing right now. I’m
shooting, taking pictures. I just told my wife I love her. I speak to my parents.’
But then this shit started coming up. I don’t talk to my sister. I don’t
talk to my son–I’d just kicked my son out of the house. I would only
talk to his mother during court custody cases. Now I’m in a bad state,
because whether or not you believe in meeting your maker, I couldn’t
die right. I had issues to deal with and I wasn’t doing a very good job
of it. And I’m very upset right now. I’m real upset–to the point
where a young man comes over to me as I am sobbing [and asks], ‘Would you
like me to take you to Christ?’ And I said, through short breaths, ‘No,
but thank you anyway.’ And it just so happens that Cathy Woods’ friend,
her name was Sharon, too. She said, ‘Steven, would you like me to go up
there with you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’

"…So
here I am, at the blood line. On my knees. And as a Jew, you are not on your
knees for anyone or anything. You might genuflect, but that’s the extent
of it. I am on my knees and all of a sudden, as if somebody literally came behind
me and pushed my forehead into the carpet, I am just sobbing, going through
my own personal primal scream, and what comes up from my gut is my son’s
mother–and I sit there and I question this, and before I can come up with
another answer, all of a sudden, my sister comes up. And I cannot fathom what
is happening. And then [his estranged son] Justin comes up. And by this time,
it’s a habit. Who else is gonna come up and I’m gonna have to regurgitate?

"And
it stops. It just stops. And I see a photo-op, and I’m starting to shoot…
And Sharon said, ‘Steven, you don’t have to shoot now.’ I say,
‘No, I’m okay, I want to shoot this.’ Now, if there’s a
camera brought out, especially in this church, it’s confiscated. I am on
the blood line, I’m no longer slammed on the carpet with my forehead, I
am now leaning up taking pictures of the people, and I keep shooting. And Sharon
says, ‘You won’t believe what just happened. There were five ushers
descending on you, and Pastor Kilpatrick waved them off.’

"I
was prayed for, and I went through these just uncontrollable spasms. I was just
like the people I was shooting, I was flipping around just like they were. I
was frightened. I couldn’t answer these questions. I’m a guy, upper-middle
class, a Jew. I mean, what is going on with my life?

"And
I started to have faith."

That experience
would be repeated several times, as Katzman continued to attend–and shoot–revivalist
services and prayer meetings as far away as Toronto. One result was a booklength
collection of photos he is currently shopping to publishers here in New York.

Other outcomes
were less tangible but, for Katzman, no less real. The secular Jew has refound
a sense of faith. That he did it through his encounters with fundamentalist
Christianity doesn’t seem to make it any less valid a religious experience,
just a more personalized, less institutional one. He didn’t go native and
convert. In a way reminiscent of the New Age 80s and 90s, he’s crafted
his own personal belief system.

Asked if
he now identifies himself as a Christian, his reply is thoughtful and provocative.

"No,
I’m a Jew. Jewish people believe that the Messiah hasn’t come, but
they believe in the Messiah. Christians believe that the Messiah has come and
the Messiah is coming again. I believe that the Messiah has come. Do I get involved
with, well, if you believe this you have to believe in the Virgin Mary, you
have to believe in this and that? You know, that’s really for somebody
else to believe in. You can’t tell me that I don’t believe just because
I don’t necessarily accept this or accept that. So, could I be baptized?
No. Do I wanna be? That’s not going to change or empower my personal belief.
We are part of a plan and I recognize that…"

I ask him
if all that means he’s become one of the "Jews for Jesus." He
says they prefer the term "messianic Jews," and admits that he’s
attended some study groups at a messianic synagogue in Sarasota. At the same
time, he and Sharon have been very involved for several years in their local
chapter of Planned Parenthood–an activity his fundamentalist friends would
surely frown on. On a more personal level, he reports, he took that "Die
Right" sermon to heart, and has worked hard to repair his relationships
with family and loved ones from whom he’d become estranged.

He speaks
of a man he knows who had a similar conversion experience while directing a
documentary film on fundamentalists. Katzman notes the director’s "newfound
faith, not in any particular religion, but in the concept and power of faith.
Although he didn’t believe in the direction that the ministers were going
in the film, he was able to separate himself from his story and look at his
faith as a personal relationship with God, and not with those who preach."

Katzman’s
revived faith is also highly idiosyncratic–yet, one feels, sincere.

"I
mean, it’s a personal relationship with God," he says. "Do I
have a problem proclaiming my love and devotion to him in a crowded room? No,
not at all. I mean, this is not about Christianity or being saved, this is about
an adult coming to terms with his faith. And realizing that he didn’t have
any faith, and as a result I feel much stronger in my conviction. Not only in
my conviction toward my relationship with God, but my conviction toward man.
My conviction just in life in general, making this a better place, okay? And
I guess I don’t care what religion that is–that’s a mitzvah.
A mitzvah to God. That’s the bottom line."