Express Newark

Chester Higgins’s photographs feature sacred thresholds. A man praying in Ethiopia’s holy Sof Omar Caves captures the interplay of devotion and unseen spiritual forces of the natural environment. His Door of No Return, taken on Gorée Island in Senegal, evokes memories of those violently separated from their homelands during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Higgins’s photographs reflect on how the sacred transforms spaces into sites of memory and transcendence. These portals reckon with the past and imagine renewal.

These works evoke barzakh, demonstrating how photography offers glimpses of the unseen that shape and sustain our reality.

Chester Higgins Photographs are featured in the “Powers of the Unseen” exhibition, on view through July 31st.

Artwork credits:
Chester Higgins Jr., Thelonius Monk, New York., 1973 Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., The Door of No Return, Gorée Island, Dakar, Senegal, 1973. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Cloth Vendor, Dakar, Senegal, 1972. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Islamic Funeral at Negash Amedin Mosque in Ethiopia
2011. Courtesy of the artist.

Chester Higgins Jr., Sacred Nile (Series) “The Sacred Cave of Sof Omar” in Bole Mountains, Ethiopia
2010. Courtesy of the artist.