When photographer Holly-Marie Cato was a little kid, she’d lay newspaper out on the floor on Saturday night and buff her family’s church shoes till the black leather gleamed for the church morning service. “Now we wear jeans, hoodies and Nikes,” she says. “Most of us carry the Bible in an app on our phone.”
Times have changed, but some things in Black British churches remain the same. For generations, they’ve been places of congregation, community and respite – serving as youth clubs, food banks, hot meal kitchens, creches and sources of emergency income support all in one.
In Cato’s debut solo show Heavy Is the Mantle, now showing at the Leica Gallery in London, she documents a transition period in the life of one such church – the Pentecostal Mission Church in Leytonstone, East London, where her great uncle Herbert Cato served as bishop until recently.
Cato followed her great uncle with her camera as he hung up his robes in preparation for retirement, photographing his congregation in their most intimate – and joyous – moments of worship and praise.
“There’s a call and response that only happens with exuberance in Black churches,” Cato says. “The pastor preaches and the church gives constant sounds and hollers of agreement. You don’t come and sit passive, you participate.”
Black churches in the UK were “never meant to be segregated,” explains Cato. But when people from the Caribbean answered the call to rebuild post-WWII Britain, they were met with hostility on the streets and in churches, forcing them to create their own spaces for worship. It’s a part of the Windrush story – and of broader British history – that has received scant attention and appreciation till now.
“Biblically the church isn’t described as a building, it’s a collection of people,” Cato says, “so for me those people who make ‘the church’, the physical extension of their love has been the backbone of communities for years and should be recognised for their contribution.”
Check out photos from Heavy Is the Mantle below.
Heavy Is the Mantle is on at the Leica Gallery in London till 1st November, 2022.
