Herewith a white photographer's journey into the churches of African Americans in the South Carolina low-country. The project was born when photographer Stanley F. Lanzano was vacationing at a posh inn on Pawley's Island. The inn made for a lovely getaway: each room was well-appointed; cocktails were served on the porch each evening. But what "intrigued" Lanzano was the "silent black staff. They moved slowly, their eyes kept low … . [W]earing starched white uniforms, they did their jobs in a quiet, efficient, and accommodating way. I wondered about their lives and dreams, their homes and families." So began Lanzano's journey into the African American communities—and especially churches—in and around Georgetown, South Carolina.

Lanzano treats readers to pictures of men and women in revival meetings, at prayer, banging tambourines and waving church fans; men and women going down into the tomb of baptism in the Santee River; and men and women, after long and short lives, in real graves, mourned by neighbors and kin. The focus here, as the subtitle suggests, is one minister (Floyd Knowlin), but Lanzano gives us a larger topography of coastal Carolina church life: "There are only town churches in Trio, and they're next door to each other. One is named St. John Church, and its neighbor is the Greater St. John Church." Scattered throughout Lanzano's text and photographs are poems and hymns:

Nobody but you Lord,

You been my doctor.

Nobody but you Lord,

When I been in trouble.

Nobody but you Lord,

Helped me save my children,

Nobody but you Lord.

Hallelujah.

Lanzano has an eye for compellingly quotidian detail; I felt I was in the hands of a photographer I trusted when he wrote, "The clarity and beauty of the polka dots on Pastor Epps's dress somehow motivated me to continue this project." I will follow anyone, I thought, enchanted by a polka dot.

Lanzano doesn't delve deeply into the larger social and economic context in which the churches he so lovingly depicts flourish. We don't see much beyond the church walls except for a few photographs of a few houses that he understatedly describes as "modest." There is not much engagement with the reality that Reconstruction-era AME minister and elected official Charles H. Pearce named when he declared that "A man in this State [Florida] cannot do his whole duty as a minister except he looks out for the political interests of his people." There are several moving photographs of the 1996 funeral of a 23-year-old homicide victim, Tyrone Brown: "Apparently he owed someone ten dollars for a radio he bought. After he was asked for it, a fight ensued and ended with his death." Lanzano tells us that the funeral was "one of the saddest … I ever witnessed." But he doesn't say much of the larger politics of a world in which young black men get shot over $10 debts, or the church's extra-liturgical response to the shooting.

The absence of this larger context is frustrating, but it doesn't diminish the striking beauty of Lanzano's photographs, or the truth of his observation that Knowlin's "mission is clear: to lead [his people] as best he can toward the joy of living, dying, and being reborn in Jesus Christ. 'I want to bring them all around the bend!' he once told me… . I believe him. He is bringing them all around the bend."

At that point, as with the polka dots, I felt I was somewhere trustworthy; I felt I was with someone who had given me an idiom that made sense of everything: oh, yes, let someone bring me around the bend, too, all the way around.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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