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But what of the reverse? How do photographs turn the familiar into the sublime? It's useful here to recall Susan Sontag's dictum that 'photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks.' What Sontag might have gone on to say is that photography in the right hands does not accept 'the world as it looks' but provides, instead, a new way of understanding the world. We can see this in Edward Weston's iconic image of an opalescent shell (once again placing a light object against a black background), which enables us to look again – and with a more finely tuned eye – at what we might too easily overlook. Christopher values images such as these in spiritual terms, for what they say to us about the divine, especially when the divine is expressed in humble objects and in the human form. When Lifson, for instance, examines Mapplethorpe's photograph of the sleeping figure, he encounters 'a strange statue of a sexually depleted Cupid [brought] into tense visual relationship with a white square above it – a geometric figure hostile to the flow of Cupid's forms.' Not so for Christopher, who sees such positive or negative spaces as allusions to 'the great life force, the divine, God's grace.' For Christopher, the two bright 'passages' in the composition are not in conflict with each other; in his view, the HYLAND