What Chester Higgins Jr. saw
Look closely at this photograph. Let your eyes stay with it, and ask yourself, "What am I really seeing?"
A man kneels in the sand before a cross. His back is to us. His arms are raised in quiet petition. A pair of sandals lie behind him, half-buried in soft earth. The Atlantic edges into view beneath a pale horizon. The morning sky, soft and open, begins to break.
This is “Sunrise Prayer on Osu Beach, Accra, Ghana,” 1973. This is what Chester Higgins Jr. saw. But more than that, this is what he recognised.
Captured in a city rich with memory and motion, this image does not simply document a ritual. It witnesses a moment of divine intimacy. The man at the centre, anonymous to us yet profoundly familiar in posture and gesture, is not performing. He is communing. Higgins, standing behind, does not interrupt. He honours the encounter. He frames without intrusion. He sees the unseen.
This quiet reverence is at the heart of Higgins’s work. His lens is attuned not to noise, but to presence. For decades, he has photographed the sacred dimension of Black life in Harlem churches, West African villages, ancestral ceremonies and daily acts of devotion. His camera is not a tool for spectacle. It is an instrument of listening.
In this frame, we are drawn into a world of spiritual stillness. The viewer’s eye follows the footprints leading towards the kneeling figure, a gentle path in the sand, marking an embodied journey towards the sacred. The discarded sandals evoke a biblical echo:
“Take off your shoes, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.”
On Osu Beach that morning, the holy was not confined to temple or altar. It rose from the sand. It moved with breath. It shimmered in silence.
This is not a portrait of religion. It is a portrait of faith. Rooted, personal, ancestral. A faith that travels. A faith that speaks in tongues older than text. Through his composition, Higgins connects continents. Ghana is not far from Alabama. Spirit is not bound by geography. The sunrise in Accra carries the weight and wonder of countless sunrises before it, some remembered, some lost.
And in the space between the camera and the cross, Higgins holds space.
He does not rush.
He does not explain.
He simply sees.
Because what Chester Higgins Jr. saw that morning in 1973 was not just a man at prayer.
He saw a moment worthy of reverence.
He saw a faith inherited and reimagined.
He saw us, in silence, in longing, in light.
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