Before I came to New York I expected to find a very secular, pushy and consumer-driven city. I was really surprised by the rich, diverse, intense religious life present in each neighborhood and the complex and sometimes complicated implications these different belief systems have for how people live their lives. The number of temples is overwhelming, but so is the media’s indifference to this aspect of the city, as is their consistent tendency to sell the world the most glamour-focused, profane vision of New York. These encounters with different religious groups and the lack of representation of spiritual life in the media began to form an idea, which has developed in to this ongoing project.
Babel, the Urge to Pray focuses on different religions in New York City, some practiced by various immigrant communities and others where the majority of the faithful are Americans. In the immigrant communities that I began photographing in 2010 – Hasidic Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, Haitian Vodouists, Hare Krishna, Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox – spirituality represents an element of unity for people that, whether they migrated here fairly recently or many generations ago, still belong to very separate social, linguistic and religious ghettos.
New York City is not just a multi ethnic, dynamic, composite metropolis but also a ‘Babel’ full of enclaves, mainly faith based. For many people in the city, religion represents a source of community and intimacy with their fellows and at the same time an element of separation from the rest of the world that doesn’t share their beliefs.
Viviana Peretti is an Italian freelance photographer based in New York where in 2010 she graduated in Documentary Photography and Photojournalism from the International Center of Photography.
In 2000, after graduating Magna Cum Laude with a BA in Anthropology from the University of Rome, she moved to Colombia where she specialized in Photojournalism and spent nine years working as a freelance photographer.
Viviana has received fellowships and awards from the International Center of Photography, the Joannie M. Chen Fund in New York, the Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in France, CNN, the University of Salamanca, the Spanish Embassy in Colombia, the Photo Museum in Bogota and the Colombian Ministry of Culture. In 2010 she has been selected for the Eddie Adams Workshop, Barnstorm XXIII. She has been published in a number of international media outlets including The New York Times, New York Magazine, CNN, BBC and L’Espresso.
