For over eight years I photographed confessionals throughout the United States. I photographed in ornate city basilicas and airy rural chapels, modern churches with angled pews and cathedrals with leaking roofs and drafty stained glass windows. Despite the diversity of architecture there was a similarity to the confessionals. They were often worn down and less cared for than the churches themselves. Many were constructed with plywood, plastic and acoustic tile. I am interested in what this architecture reveals – the people and stories the confessionals have held and the way the spaces sometimes feel like the act of confessing. I photographed from the perspective of the penitent with a large format camera and available light, often using long exposures to reveal the dark spaces. I searched with my camera for what might be left behind.

I found spaces that were haunting and humorous, intimidating and beautiful. I found icons, needlepoint and creative, poignant ways to imagine the divine. I found worn kneelers, scuffs and scratches – traces of all the people who had been in these rooms and layers of their voices dissolved into the walls. I found wadded up prayers, Kleenex and rosaries. I found a blurring of the secular and the religious, the desire for redemption and the slight hope that it might be possible.

Almost all religions have theologies of repentance – what makes the confessional unusual is that it acts as a physical manifestation of an abstract idea. It gives a form and process to forgiveness. During the Middle Ages confessing out loud was considered the only way to separate sins from the body; the early confessionals became, in part, a container for voices and sins. Confessionals still suggest this function – one confesses surrounded by the remnants of past confessions.

I was raised Catholic and photographing has also been a way for me to grapple with my complex relationship to this religion. Many years later I still have more questions than insights. What sustains faith? Why do we seek more than we can see? In the confessionals, I have found structures that embody contradiction – rooms that give shape to darkness and light, secrets and revelation, corporeality and transcendence – spaces that suggest the paradoxes of faith and forgiveness.