©Lisa Barlow, Holy Land USA book cover, published by Stanley Barker Books

I first became aware of the Holy Land theme park in Orlando when I saw Gordon Stettinius’ hilarious toy camera project on the mecca of all things Jesus. I finally made my own pilgrimage to the this sun filled hallowed destination in Florida shortly before it closed down for good in 2020. I had the great pleasure of meeting Jesus in the gift shop and after a few photographs of the two of us together, he asked me if I had anything he could help me with. Later, I sat in the front row of a Broadway-like performance of bible stories and realized that Jesus couldn’t carry a tune and was just lip syncing the musical numbers. Disappointing, but the memory of my time with busloads of devoted white haired 80-year olds has stayed with me.

Needless to say, when I discovered  my friend Lisa Barlow‘s fabulous new book, Holy Land U.S.A., published by STANLEY BARKER, I was more than intrigued. During the pandemic, Barlow had time to revisit work made decades before at a different Holy Land, this one in Connecticut. The photographs in the book were all made in 1980 and 1981 when Lisa was an American Studies major at Yale. Drawn to explore the urban landscape surrounding New Haven, she discovered Waterbury, CT, when she first noticed the enormous cross that looms above the city from a hilltop above Interstate I84. Beneath it, lay a lovingly assembled diorama of Jerusalem with scenes from the Bible portrayed in plaster, rebar and cement, and across the hilltop in towering letters, HOLY LAND U.S.A.

“What at first take was a kitschy wonder, repeat visits led Lisa into the town below and towards a larger understanding of the place and the community it served. Waterbury in 1980, had slipped from its impressive stance as the “Brass Capital of the World” to being just another failing mill town with empty factories and rising poverty. But in the people Lisa met as she walked through town, she saw resilience, joy and pride of place, a different kind of holiness that she sought to portray with her compassionate and humor fueled vision.“

An interview with the artist follows.

©Lisa Barlow, Spread from Holy Land U.S.A., published by Stanley Barker

©Lisa Barlow, Spread from Holy Land U.S.A., published by Stanley Barker

©Lisa Barlow, Spread from Holy Land U.S.A., published by Stanley Barker

Born in Washington D.C., Lisa Barlow grew up in NYC.  For many years she worked professionally using her camera as a narrative storyteller for Public Television and select nonprofits in NYC. During the Pandemic, she returned to old negatives and discovered the pleasures of book making.

Holy Land U.S.A. was published by STANLEY/BARKER in October 2024.

Work from Holy Land U.S.A. has been shown at the David Hill Gallery in London and at Slate Gray Gallery in Telluride, CO during the Telluride Film Festival.

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How to order:

https://www.stanleybarker.co.uk/collections/frontpage/products/holy-land-u-s-a

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography.

I bought my first camera, a used Pentax, with babysitting money when I was 13. I was in summer school that year learning French and we had to take an elective. My teacher was Janet Borden, who went on to start her own gallery. We took a class trip to Boston to see a photography show and I remember jolting to a stop in front of Diane Arbus’s photograph of the young man in a straw hat with a “Bomb Hanoi” button. I was shocked by the power of the image and Arbus’s command in taking it. I understood that you could make bold statements as a photographer and that the camera was an eloquent tool with which to explore all the quirkiness I saw around me as a young teenager.

Later, I have to give credit to a series of great teachers at Andover and Yale who challenged me to see in new ways.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

How did the project start?

 I was an undergraduate, studying photography, but majoring in American Studies. Tod Papageorge was my photography teacher, and we were looking closely at Robert Frank’s The Americans in class. Tod’s extraordinary ability to parse an image, using a host of poetic references of his own, was inspiring. I remember going to Holy Land for the first time and feeling as if I could bring some of my own references into the pictures I made that day. There was also an overlap with some of what I was learning about the American urban landscape in my history class, and it was easy to imagine I could use this work to make a photographic essay as my senior project in my major.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

What continued to draw you to Holy Land?

Well, Holy Land, itself, is an 18-acre patch of land on top of a hill overlooking Waterbury, CT. Built by an Italian immigrant around 1960 as a kind of Catholic theme park, it was falling apart when I found it first in 1980. It was charmingly kitschy, but you could tell it was built with a great deal of earnestness and faith. If I first started taking pictures with a kind of slack jawed wonder, I soon understood that this place held a great deal of meaning to the people coming to spend time there. It was when I went down into the town below the shrine that I really began to feel the pull.

I continued to visit Waterbury because I was making strong work there, but I can see clearly now that there were other reasons that kept luring me back. My parents were divorcing that year, my grandmother had just died and because I had taken a year off from school to live in Paris, I was a bit out of step with my classmates. The people I was meeting in Waterbury were tremendously engaging. They were fun to be with, and in one case, very familial. There was such joy and warmth in one of the households that I’m sure it grounded me in some way. I think that comes through in the work. I loved these people.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

What made you return to this work decades after you captured it?

Like many of us during the Pandemic, I learned new things that I didn’t think had time for earlier. I finally had time to scan the piles of negatives that I had in boxes in the basement. Initially, I just used a flatbed scanner to see what I had. I thought I would race through all the years of work pretty quickly. But the first negatives I pulled out were from Waterbury and I was immediately transported back in time. It became an obsession to see the work as a group again. It was as if I was living in the past and the present at the same time. We were stuck inside in Brooklyn, really turning inward to begin with, and then I started scanning all day, listening to songs from 1981, the year I made the work, and dreaming about all the people as if they were still in my life—it was a strangely wonderful time, as if part of myself was returned to me that I had lost.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

Did you discover anything unexpected in looking at the work in a new context?

That is such a good question. Yes! My friend Ports Bishop had reminded me of something the photographer Matthew Monteith said about needing to see where you’ve been to see where you are going. What can you learn from your old work? In my case, I realized that I have always been a storyteller. My interests in the theater, cinema, poetry and literature are in full evidence in this early work. Plus, the work is often funny. I love how much I could compress into the frame in the Holy Land work. I think that in the work I make today, I take more images to tell a story. That may be the influence of the photobook. In the 1980’s, there were few examples of photobooks as narratives. Photographers showed their work as catalogs of images. Today, we use the book form to slow down the pace. We allow our emotions and understanding to build over the course of a book’s pages.

I think that Gregory Barker uses that modern sensibility beautifully when he creates narrative arcs with old work. My archive from Holy Land is large. There are so many more pictures. But I love the tight edit he made, using recurring characters and places to build meaning and allow the viewer to experience the town in its fullness.

I also like the way I used flash then and I’m beginning to use it again.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

What is inspiring you today?

Well, building on that last question, I am still interested in conveying a sense of place, but I am thinking of doing that in ways that my fuller understanding of the photobook’s possibilities allows. And I am using new camera formats to see what best suits a subject. I love photographing on the F Train in NYC. My phone is perfect, though I do occasionally try out a pocket-sized point and shoot. I am using a medium format digital camera to make landscapes in Texas. This has been a slow learning curve. Landscapes did not come easily at first. Because I love to work fast and sometimes secretively, especially on the subway, I’ve had to learn to slow down, to use a tripod, to get out of the house at blue hour and to be very meditative as I think about what I want a picture to say, or really, what the place I am in wants to say.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

 What is coming up?

I’ve been doing book signings at Paris Photo, in London and I gave a fun talk at Photobook Austin. I hope there is more of that. In terms of work, I have two full projects from the 1980’s that I’m ready to make into books. And a host of current work in color that is coming into shape.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.

©Lisa Barlow, from the book Holy Land U.S.A.