Monday, July 08, 2019

Ordination Ceremony

Zagreb, Yugoslavia, 1970

While the IHP group was based for weeks in Belgrade, in the Serbian eastern part of then-Yugoslavia, I got good material for my ritual project at Eastern, Orthodox Rite, churches. Then I traveled alone to Zagreb in the western, mainly Roman Catholic, section of the country. At the Cathedral I made contact with a priest who was a French language teacher, which equipped him to understand my terrible college student French. I wound up being invited to photograph a rare ordination Mass.






This will be the last of these archive posts from 50 year old pictures for now. I'll be back to this blog's usual material tomorrow. As an interesting personal aside, my paternal grandparents immigrated to America around 1900, from Austria. Zagreb is quite near the Austrian border (and of course the borders have been fluid over the past couple centuries). I must look the part, because over the four or five days I spent in Zagreb, at least half a dozen times people approached me to ask for directions or other guidance in halting tourist-handbook Croatian.

4 comments:

David said...

I enjoyed this “blast from the past”. You were very fortunate to have such a grand adventure. Isn’t it fun to see your pictures from 50 years ago and think “I kind of knew what I was doing, even way back then”.

Carl Weese said...

Thanks David. I was fortunate to win the scholarship, and even more so that the faculty let me concentrate almost entirely on photography and writing instead of schoolwork. Revisiting these pictures is such a powerful experience that it's a bit unsettling.

Anonymous said...

Fantastic, Carl! Glad I found these on your website! Amazing how different — and rich!— all our experiences were. Alex

Carl Weese said...

Hi Alex. If you look in the labels section of the right had blog sidebar, you can find "IHP"—click on it and you'll see the ten posts with pictures from the trip. There are also a couple galleries of trip pictures at the very bottom of the "online galleries" page of my web site, there's a linknear the top of the blog sidebar. Looking forward to seeing you in September.