DETROIT — Patricia Drury didn’t originally set out to photograph every church in the Archdiocese of Detroit, but that’s what she wound up doing.
"I just took a few, and then thought I would do them all,” said Drury, a Grosse Pointe resident who runs a management training consultancy.
“Sometimes, something draws my attention, and ’til I’ve exhausted it, I don’t want to let go of it,” she said.
She had worked as a photographer during the early years of her service in the U.S. Army Reserve, but hadn’t been involved in photography after that, until a few years ago when she bought her first digital single-lens reflex camera.
Drury took photos of a total of 291 Catholic worship sites in the six counties that make up the archdiocese over about two years, mostly in 2009. The entire collection of photos can be viewed on her Flickr site online.
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As the project progressed, Drury said, she tried for a more artistic approach to her photos, and even decided to upgrade to a more sophisticated Nikon camera than the one she started with.
“Some of the early ones are kind of snapshotty, and I would like to do them over if I could, but I don’t think I have the energy or ‘bandwidth’ to do it,” she said.
Drury said she set as her goal photographing at least the exterior of every church, but would also get interior shots if the church was open or if somebody was around to let her in.
After completing her series on churches, she embarked in 2011 on a new series that involved taking a picture of a different person — always a stranger — every day for a year. One of her favorite photos taken in a church — of a young girl crucifer at St. Charles Borromeo in Detroit — is actually from that second series.
Having seen every church in the archdiocese (including a few that are now closed),
Drury is reluctant to name a favorite, but will mention several among her favorites for different reasons.
So, for example, she likes the historic grandeur of Ste. Anne de Detroit by the Ambassador Bridge, but also the “distinct kind of old and homey” character of St. Mark Chapel on Harsens Island, one of the worship sites of Our Lady on the River Parish.
St. Patrick Mission in Clifford is another favorite among the smaller churches, while St. Charles Borromeo — just a few blocks from the Belle Isle Bridge — is one of her favorites among the larger churches in the city.
More modern churches also have their appeal to Drury’s aesthetics. “The stained glass windows in St. Frances Cabrini in Allen Park just blew me away. They’re just so blue and just gorgeous,” she said.
Besides the nearly 600 photos displayed on the nine Flickr pages, Drury also got something spiritual out of her project that became a pilgrimage.
“It underscored a sense of connectedness that I have felt with my Catholic faith,” she said.
The experience added a deeper geographical dimension to that sense of connectedness, just as genealogical research that revealed how her maternal ancestors left England for America to escape religious persecution during the reign of Oliver Cromwell and learning how various Drurys were prosecuted as “recusants” for refusing to give up their Catholic faith provided a historical connectedness, she explained.
But the experience has also made her somewhat of a “nomad” when it comes to Mass attendance, Drury acknowledged. Although her move to Grosse Pointe two years ago put her within the parish boundaries of St. Paul on the Lake, she said she has not registered there.
“They have a glorious, wonderful, lovely church, but I often head down to St. Charles Borromeo or sometimes to Ste. Anne de Detroit on a Sunday morning,” she said.
Or it can be somewhere else on a given Sunday; last weekend, Drury said, she went to Sacred Heart Church, at the north end of Detroit’s Eastern Market.
And she said she is looking forward to the day when Divine Mercy Parish in Davisburg, which now holds services in a local school, builds its own church. When that happens, she plans to go there — and take a photo.
