INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA.- The Indianapolis Museum of Art presents "Covenant - Photographs by Tyagan Miller," on view through November 10, 2002. Covenant is an exhibition of 65 black-and-white photographs that represent the culmination of Tyagan Miller’s five-year documentation of the life and times of the Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in Indianapolis. Miller, the Riley Lecturer at Indiana University’s School of Journalism, says that he first became interested in his subject—an inner-city African American Baptist church and its congregation—when he was a teacher in an alternative high school for at-risk teenagers. He noticed that "those African American teenagers who were able to struggle effectively against the hardships of inner-city living were also deeply connected to the life of the church." He wanted to know why a church could succeed where other programs had failed.



Underwritten by grants from the Lilly Endowment and The Polis Center, Miller participated in a continuous succession of Sunday services, weddings, funerals and other congregational events that allowed him, as an outsider, to examine the ties that bind the community of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church together. The resulting work is in the best tradition of American photojournalism, combining the immediacy and social import of documentary photography with aesthetically compelling imagery.



Over the several years that Miller took his photographs (from 1996 to 2000), he not only found answers to his question, but also found himself on "a journey toward deeper understanding of a way of life very different from my own." He found a community whose members, both young and old, shared a vision of a life beyond the hardships and struggles of the imperfect world in which they lived. He says that they are guided by a covenant, "an affirmation of life and the human spirit through fellowship, knowledge and worship."



Miller’s work on the Covenant series began when he took part in a special project sponsored by The Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, and Lilly Endowment Inc. He was among a group of Indiana writers and photographers who were documenting aspects of spirituality and community in Indianapolis, and he asked permission to photograph services and other events at the church. In 1998, the work of the project’s participants was presented in an IMA exhibition titled Falling Toward Grace and in a book by the same title published by Indiana University Press.



Believing that he had not finished his work on the project, Miller continued to photograph the church and its congregation. The 65 photographs in this exhibition are part of a much larger series of 250 prints made from 4,000 negatives taken of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church and its members. The series, which records the life of the church, also includes portraits of unnamed individual members as well as excerpts from interviews with church members and the pastor, Ronald Covington Sr.