Ritual Images

The images in texts and textbooks devoted to ritual are often of poor quality and limited due to cost. Since much ritual is highly visual, it makes sense that students of ritual tend to photographing rites. Photographing ritual opens up methodological and theoretical questions, but also technical and aesthetic ones. We offer here two different examples of handling a series of ritual images. The first using the NextGen Gallery for WordPress, the second embeds a slideshow from Picasa, a popular site for uploading and displaying photographs. Are there advantages to one or the other?

These images, in a NextGen gallery, are from Barry Stephenson’s fieldwork on Wittenberg,  Germany’s annual festivals.

NextGen Gallery

Picasa Gallery

Another alternative is to embed a gallery that you maintain elsewhere. Some photo sites, Picasa, for example, provide users with an html code that can be copied and pasted into a post, thus creating an embedded slide show or set of photos. These are photos from Abandoned Sacred: Highgate United Church, and they are not actually on the Ritual Studies site. Instead, they are embedded from Ron Grimes’ Picasa gallery.