Located a few miles from the Alamo on San Antonio’s south side, Riverside Baptist Church consists of a modest complex of brick structures built over the course of several decades. The sanctuary’s engaged portico expresses vaguely classical details and is flanked by an educational building and a fellowship hall that more explicitly reflect the eras of their construction. But the photographs collected in The Things Not Seen Are Eternal do not dwell on the exterior of these buildings. Instead, they explore the seen and unseen artifacts found in their vast, depopulated interiors.
The photographer, Herman Ellis Dyal, spent much of his childhood inside Riverside Baptist Church. As explained in a concise essay appending the collection of documentary photos published by GOST Books in April, the 1950s of his youth was “the high-water mark of institutional Christianity in Eisenhower’s America, and we were in one of the city’s largest and fastest-growing churches.”
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