A Little Explanation of Our Photomosaic

by: Bryan McKaig

A lot of you have asked questions about the huge picture of Jesus that’s hanging in the front of our worship center. Well, here’s a little, or read on for a lot, about the image and how we made it.

The Process:

When Chad first decided to preach through the Gospel according to John, we began brainstorming visual ideas that would help our worship environment to mesh with the themes of John. The central theme of John comes from 20:31 – “…that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.” The two most important images in John are light and life. We decided that light would be more simple to convey visually. We wanted something that would totally change the feel of the room and make an impression.

We thought about creating stained glass windows – a project that we researched and tested but that proved to be a bit too expensive and time-consuming. Windows shine because of the light that passes through them – and we liked the way that stained glass references the ancient. We had a specific image of Jesus in mind, one that would be easy to recognize and really looked old and historic.

We ended up using the same image, but adapting it to the large format picture that you now see. Here’s how we made it:

First, we selected our image. This one is taken from a tile mosaic made in the 13th century. The original mosaic is the the church of Hagia Sophia, located in what was then Constantinople.

We wanted to communicate something about “the essential Jesus,” so we gathered pictures of Jesus, about 50 different ones, that reflect many traditions and many ideas about him. While some of the images reflect a misunderstanding of who Christ is, most of them are simply the attempts of people to express their devotion to Christ through their art.

We used a free program for Mac, called AndreaMosaic (which you can get here if you’re interested) to combine the 50 small repeating images into a photomosaic. We actually divided it into nine squares to make the size of the image more manageable, because we wanted to print it at 12ft by 12ft. If you look closely at the image, you’ll see that it is composed of about 18,000 little pictures of Jesus.

Next, we tackled the question of how to print it. Budget concerns gave us extra motivation to come up with a creative way to build it for a small price tag. We used about 50 sheets of poster board (the kind you made all your elementary school science projects on) and connected them together with strips of poster board and Super 77 spray adhesive. We printed the picture as (roughly) 300 8.5×11 pages, using the color printer in the office. Two volunteers, Jill Kovalchik and Judy Gamble, took the pages home and trimmed off all the white borders, keeping them in order. Then John Barber and I took all 300 pages and began the process of attaching them to the posterboard, making sure each piece lined up as well as possible with the last.

Once we had it all assembled, we attached a 12ft. 1″ x 2″ board to the top of the image and hoisted it up to the top of the stage backdrop using straps. We screwed it down and prayed that nothing would go wrong. And so far, it’s still hanging!

That’s how we did it. So, if anyone ever needs you to make a 12′ by 12′ photomosaic using only printer paper, posterboard, and spray glue, you know how to do it! Feel free to bug us with questions!

If you want a version of your very own, download one here! These work great for your computer’s wallpaper! To save the image to your computer, right-click the link and choose ‘Save As’ or ‘Save Link As.’

Christ Pantocrator 800×600 (913 KB)

Christ Pantocrator 1280×800 (1.7 MB)

Christ Pantocrator 1680×1050 (2.7 MB)

Christ Pantocrator 1680×1680 (4.3 MB)

Christ Pantocrator Full Size (61MB)

History of the Image (the short version):

Any time art and religion cross paths, you have the potential for endless information. I’ll try to keep the historical explanation as simple as possible, and try not to step too far outside of my expertise.

The image, as noted above, comes from Hagia Sophia, the third church to stand on its site after the first two were burned in AD 404 and AD 532. It is a mosaic, created from thousands of tiny colored glass tiles, set into plaster. The church is one of the most stunning works of architecture anywhere in the world – and was later converted to a mosque. The image probably dates from the late 12th to early 13th century. Crusaders in the Latin conquest of 1204 probably saw this very mosaic.

The image itself is an icon from the Byzantine tradition (or, Eastern Orthodox tradition). This style of depicting Jesus is known as Christ Pantocrator, or Christ the Almighty. Pantocrator is the Greek word used to translate the Hebrew el shaddai, a Hebrew name for God in the Old Testament. el shaddai means, roughly, “God Almighty.” The image of Christ Pantocrator represents Jesus as the creator and sustainer of all things – just as John in his gospel says, “All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” (1:3).

The pantocrator image is very prevalent in ancient Christian art – there are hundreds of examples from the 7th century forward. Older versions probably existed, but were destroyed during several periods of anti-icon (or, iconoclastic) sentiment. Icons, viewed in some Christian traditions as having sacred and miraculous qualities, came to be seen as idolatrous by many believers, and as a result, many were destroyed. It’s important to note that we don’t think icons are sacred or miraculous, and we don’t accept them the way that Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy do. These traditions, to varying degrees, venerate, in some sense worship through icons, images of Jesus, Mary, and the saints.

We chose the image because of its connection to history, and because it says the same thing about Jesus that John says – that he is God and his is a man. In this type of image, Jesus is always pictured from about the waist up, with a gold halo behind his head. To either side of the halo (though they are cut off in our version) are the letters IC and CX – which are abbreviations of the name Jesus Christ. In his left arm he holds a book that represents the Gospels or the New Testament – the message about him. With his right hand, he makes a gesture of blessing or teaching, similar to the gesture a Roman general might make over his troops. It is a majestic way of saying that Jesus is the mild but stern creator and sustainer of everything in creation – his authority and power are limitless.

For more, here are the sources I used for all the information above:

Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_Pantokrator

The Hagia Sophia website:

http://www.pallasweb.com/deesis/history.html

http://www.pallasweb.com/deesis/howmade.html