 When Chrissie Knight entered Princeton Seminary in the fall of 1995, she thought that maybe she would go on to do a Ph.D. and then teach. However, she soon discovered that, because of serious injuries she sustained during a near-fatal car accident in high school, her memory functions were impaired.
She was encouraged by many people at the Seminary to pursue ordination. But after a summer field education placement in Oklahoma, during which she preached and led worship fifteen times in ten weeks, Knight decided that ordination was not the route for her either. “I want to do ministry where people don’t expect it. In church, people have expectations. I want to give people what they expect to get from church but in a different context,” says Knight. That context, she has discovered, is photography. Early in her adolescence, Knight was on the other side of the camera. A willowy 5'11"-teenager, she had a brief career as a runway model in Houston, Texas, where she grew up. Later, in high school, she dabbled in taking photographs. But it wasn’t until two years ago, when she began working as a student photographer for the Seminary’s Office of Communications/Publications, that she made her way into the darkroom and began to teach herself how to develop and print. (InSpire readers will have seen her work featured in the summer 1997 issue and scattered throughout other issues during the past two years.) Although she has only been shooting and printing her own work for a short time, Knight has developed something of her own photographic “eye.” “What I aim to do,” she says, “is to capture the everyday things in life that people ordinarily don’t see but just breeze by.” She stops not only to smell the roses, but to photograph them as well! Knight relates this artistic approach to her theology. “I believe that God is present to us always. God has created so much that we could appreciate, but we don’t. Photography allows me to take the time to look and to see God’s creation, whether it is in an awe-inspiring sunset or a rock on the path.” For Knight, God is, too, a God of grace, life, and love. But she has not always understood God as a God of love. One of the earliest recollections she has of anyone speaking directly of God was in the church nursery school she attended while living in New Orleans. “The teacher left us alone in the classroom right before recess and told us not to make any mischief. Of course, being little kids, we acted up,” Knight says. “While we were left alone, a huge thunderstorm broke out; there was lightning and heavy rain. And when the teacher returned, she said, ‘See, God is punishing you for misbehaving by taking away your recess.’ ” Knight learned about God’s grace, life, and love both through formal religion and education and through experiences and friends. Among the people who influenced her most deeply was a Jewish family friend, “Uncle Abe.” Though not actually a blood relation, “Uncle Abe” played an important role in Knight’s spiritual and artistic formation. “He saw potential in everything,” she recalls. “He saw the value in me when I couldn’t see it in myself; he encouraged me.” In retrospect, the fact that “Uncle Abe” was a New York lighting designer who lit Prometheus in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center makes perfect sense to Knight, who has followed her own path into the light. “Photography is all about light and darkness and the continuum of shades between them,” she says. “Light reveals, but depending on the arrangement of light, it can also conceal. Which is sort of like the way that God works, sometimes in light and sometimes in shadows. And the shadow-times are as crucial as the others.” Knight speaks from experience, and not just experience behind the lens. Early in the spring semester as other seniors were applying for pastorates and preparing for ordination, she was in the dark about her own future. “I didn’t have a clue,” she says. On a whim, she ventured into downtown Princeton to the Pryde Brown Photographic Studio on Hulfish Street and offered her services. Brown, a much sought after photographer who has been practicing in Princeton for more than twenty years, looked at Knight’s portfolio and offered her a position. Since early March, Knight has worked there part time developing film, cutting down negatives, printing contact sheets, and making prints. She feels blessed to have been given this opportunity. "The most honest way that I can live out my life and be true to myself is by being a photographer. If that's what a call means," she says, "then I feel that I have been called to photography." So did she need to come to seminary for three years to learn that? Does she have any regrets about having spent both time and money at Princeton? "Not at all," she says. "Everything that I have learned here through my friends, in classes, through working with the Stewardship Committee, by teaching Sunday school to 6th and 7th graders, and by babysitting - it is all lived out in my life. I am able to be present to life because of the time that I spent here." © Copyright 1998 Princeton
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“It’s hard to teach
when you can’t remember what you’re supposed to
be teaching,” she laughs.
