Mark Mabry was feeling frustrated about his career as a photographer.
In fact, he wanted to quit.
Sure, the weddings and family portraits were paying the bills. But it was the commercial photography part of his work that was getting him down — the ad campaigns and other photo shoots that required him to portray less-than-wholesome subjects.
"How do you do that and stay upright?" Mabry remembers asking himself two years ago. "If I'm shooting unworthy subjects, then I'm unworthy."
After a period of soul-searching and changes in his own life, Mabry, 31, finds himself in the spotlight as the creator of "Reflections of Christ," a multimedia photo exhibit that was on display at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building last weekend during general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The exhibit, which features photographic scenes from Christ's life — from his birth to ministry to crucifixion to resurrection — has moved on to Brigham Young University-Idaho in Rexburg, Idaho, where it can be seen through Oct. 17. "Reflections of Christ" will return to Salt Lake City from Oct. 20 to Nov. 8 and then go to Provo for a week before beginning a nationwide tour, including stops in California, Louisiana and Mesa, Ariz., where Mabry lives with his wife, Tara, and three young children. Copies of the exhibit are also on display in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, through February and at the Washington, D.C., Temple visitors center through Christmas.
The exhibit includes an original soundtrack by Clyde Bawden and Jason Barney of specially arranged hymns, plus a behind-the-scenes documentary shot by videographer Cameron Trejo.
"Reflections of Christ" started with Mabry's reflections on his own life.
"I got a series of promptings as I prayed," he said in an interview last week in the chapel of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.
The first prompting came: Change your music.
He got rid of all his rap and hip-hop.
Then he got another prompting "in the same voice" — throw away your art books.
"A lot of them were trash," he said. "I chucked them all."
The next prompting: Stop drinking Monsters (an energy drink). So he did.
And then another: You need to do the story of Christ.
That prompting took a little more time to pull off.
"I'm sitting one day in front of the computer about to start a project," Mabry said. "It dawns on me — if I'm going to succeed, I need to forget about other ambitions."
Those ambitions included advertising campaigns and photo spreads in fashion magazines. He started deleting computer files.
"I took out everything that doesn't represent (the real) me," Mabry said. "I knew that the Lord wanted my ears, my eyes, my heart and my trust."
In the meantime, he was called to serve on the public relations committee of the Mesa Easter Pageant, "Jesus the Christ." His assignment was to take pictures that would be used as public relations photos for the pageant. While he was being set apart, he was told that his project "will go forth to the world."
It was that very project that led to "Reflections of Christ."
MABRY SAYS HE spent "four months shooting solid" to come up with the photographic scenes from Christ's life. He estimates that half the people who appear in the photos are cast members of the Easter pageant. The others are people he knows, including his sister, his electrician and his elders quorum president.
He says photo technique took a back seat to the Spirit. "The big question was to get the Spirit to come through in the shoot and the photos," Mabry said. Scriptures and prayer played a vital part in the process.
In a video on the exhibit Web site, Robert Allen, the actor who played Christ in the pageant and in "Reflections," speaks about the photo shoot depicting the healing of a blind man.
"We read from the scriptures ... beforehand about how those around that man asked who sinned — this man or his parents — and the Savior's answer was that neither of them, but that the power of God might be made manifest in them," Allen says. "And that just struck me ... how the power of God is made manifest in our lives through our weakness, whether that be a physical handicap or our propensity to sin, our disobedience at times. Those weaknesses are the means by which we draw close to God."
Mabry says the project changed his life to the very core.
"It's as if (the Savior) were in my bedroom as I prayed" about what photos to shoot and where to shoot them, he said. "It has given my career new life and changed my life in every way."
When the project was first posted on
www.reflectionsofchrist.org, a Web site devoted to the exhibit, Mabry says he was getting at least 100 e-mails a day. "It went huge real fast," he said. People kept stopping him on the street to talk about Christ, and he felt a responsibility to be a good example.
"I can't speed through the neighborhood or I'm a hypocrite," he said.
The attention has made him feel uncomfortable at times, but it does give him a chance to talk about the church.
"People ask, 'What have you been working on?"' he said. "So I talk about Jesus."
The images are included in a new book by Mabry, also titled "Reflections of Christ," which will be published Oct. 25 by Reflections Media Group, an imprint of Deseret Book.
Mabry considers the book a missionary project — and the means for his work to "go forth to the world," as he was told when starting his Easter pageant assignment.
MABRY DIDN'T SET out to be a photographer. He liked playing football and was a defensive end for Mountain View High School in Mesa. He walked on at Arizona State University and made the team, but "I would have been a tackling dummy," he said. When he and his wife learned she was expecting their first child, he decided it was "time to go get a real life."
"I wanted to end up in law," he said.
But real life had other ideas.
He got a job carrying a photographer's equipment, started shooting a few photos and found out he liked it. One day in a political science class, he thought, "I want to be a photographer." He walked out of the class and started on the path to become one. He studied art photography at the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif.
Years later, after starting the "Reflections of Christ" project, he learned that not everything would go smoothly in a family financial sense.
Mabry says that one day his wife told him she needed to go buy diapers for the baby, so he handed her the American Express card. That had always been a signal that there was no cash, and his wife was worried. He says he told her things would turn out OK with their finances and with the project. She said OK, and took the card.
He credits his wife with being extremely supportive, perhaps because of the changes in his life.
"The brash photographer Mark had turned into a different person," Mabry said. "It was repentance, not just a phase."
Mabry, who served a Mormon mission in St. Petersburg, Russia, believes he has a responsibility to live righteously.
"If I become unfaithful, the power of the exhibit will be lost," he said.
As far as his other photo work is concerned, "I've covenanted that I won't shoot commercial (projects) except clean stuff."
He says he has a "hunger to create more." For his next project, he plans to shoot photos of Christ in the Americas and hopes to start that this winter in Guatemala. He also wants to portray the Restoration in photos — possibly next spring — with Joseph Smith interacting with deity.
But he's careful not to read too much into his photographer's role. He has asked himself if he loves Christ more than making images of Christ.
"I focus on my intentions."
E-mail: rwalsh@desnews.com