Mourning St Stephen’s

In this article, I consider a photograph from 1955 showing parishioners from St. Stephen’s, Salford, along with an architectural model of their church, which they have carried in the ‘Whit Walk’ religious parade through central Manchester. I explore their architectural methodology with sustained focus on this single photograph, which I propose to read in several ways in order to engage with the dynamics of haunting that it reveals. Different theoretical approaches to photography and to representation more broadly are brought into contact with an approach to ‘spectrography’ discussed by Bernard Stiegler and Jacques
Derrida, in order to draw out a range of resonances set up between this photograph, the event it recorded, and what might reach us across the interval between then and now, them and us.