agreed. I had taken classical voice lessons in high school and sang with a Renaissance choir in college and had always loved singing sacred music, no matter from what religious tradition it came.

Holy Tabernacle's Pastor, Carl J. Graham - who became a bishop in 2004 - was born in North Carolina and moved to New York when he was a young man. For 30 years he worked the night shift as a mechanic for the U.S. Postal Service. He founded the church on January 6, 1974 and held his first church service in his apartment along with his wife, Peggy Graham; his mother, Rosette Monroe; and his sister, Mae Kee. On the first Sunday in August of 1979, the church relocated to its current home on East 114th Street in Harlem.

I was so inspired by him, his incredibly loving wife and the congregation that I asked him if I could come back and photograph a service for a class in photojournalism that I had begun at the International Center of Photography. My teacher, Claudio Edinger, told us that if we wanted to rapidly improve our technique we should choose a project in a place where we could go back to over and over again until we got things right. One day of photographing the Holy Tabernacle Church turned into a five year project.