This Page Last Updated January 2nd, 2009 (new style reckoning)
Photo Albums
Photography is sinful, as Karp the Old Believer (in the First Photos) explains.
Photography is sinful because it is a sin to gaze or stare at a thing.
The ancient Christian rules for iconography say that we should not fix our gaze upon icons.
Photography is also sinful due to the spiritually defiling man made chemicals used.
Even digital photography uses unholy man-made electricty and petroleum chemicals.
So, the last photos page is every bit, if not more of sin, than the first.
More
On Photography
On page 88 and 89 in the book Old Believers in Modern Russia we can read that, “by the turn of the nineteenth century the predominance of westernized secular art, technological processes of photo and art production, and the rise of portrait photography made many Old Believers uneasy.” The more strict Old Believers showed outright disdain toward western pictorial forms and portrait photography. The use of western art or photography does not conform to the ideals of authentic, ancient Christianity. Such items have “the tinge of the pernicious influence of human flesh...” and also the “tinge of rationalistic views on the divine traditional prescriptions of the Christian church... Great consternation was felt by those Old Believers who suspected that the process could confuse secular portraiture with iconography.” One “argument explained that Old Believers must be wary of nontraditional pictorial forms because ‘the educational meaning of pictures and drawings is very great; many times it effects the mind, will and heart of a person far more convincingly than the wordy, eloquent argument of a preacher’. In other words, secular art could lead to secular ideas.”
Since photography is made with petroleum, what the book has to say a couple of pages earlier is appropriate to add here. Page 86 “‘It is not pleasing [to God to burn petroleum] for it is necessarily that a sacrifice be clean, and not like the sacrifice of Cain.’ Likewise, only pure beeswax candles were acceptable as sacrifices, not [petroleum] paraffin ones.”
Christians are to be a living sacrifice, offering everything they are to God. Photography is a sin and spiritually unclean. Good Christians should have nothhing to do with such unholy things. Lithographs or other types of photographic reproductions are of inferior quality to the ancient image forms.
Holy Images are no longer actual Ikons. The situation for many Old Believers has truly changed into that of being Disneyland for the masses. The strict Orthodox Old Believers have always been warning that western ways like photography would turn Holy Icons into spectacles, where people become mere spectators and not actual worshippers. Now this has gone completely full circle. It is illustrated so clearly by this article. The Internet itself is similarly antichrist. It is true, as this article suggests, that if holy things which are reserved for the faithful, are then given to unbelievers, then Orthodoxy and the very Faith itself becomes lost. It is similar to the idea that photography is robbery of the spirit. It is worse than selling things to the lowest bidder. It is delusion to say nothing happens. What happens is that a contrary tradition is made, replacing the most ancient with what is deviant. What is seen as survival is actually our undoing. As some things are harmful we are not to look at them, like the Sun or spiritually defiling things. May we take heed from such worldliness and shun them all before ruin quickly faces us all.