Anne Wetzel didn’t begin looking at the world through the eye of a camera until she retired.

For 30 years, she worked in the fine arts department at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. After retirement from her job as a senior administrator, on a whim she decided to take a photography class from her friend Becky Young, a faculty member.

“I never looked back after that,” she said in an interview last week at her home on Mount Desert Island where she has a darkroom. “I took every photography class offered. They were full of undergraduates, and I was old enough be a mom to most of them.”

Her specialty then was flowers and landscapes.

But today Wetzel is best known for her photographs that capture the liturgical life of the Episcopal Church and its members.

She often spent Holy Week in Chicago, visiting her sister, Phoebe Griswold, who is married to the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

So Wetzel decided to capture the emotional journey Christians make through Holy Week.

For three years in the mid-1990s, she took her camera into St. James Cathedral in downtown Chicago and photographed every aspect of the liturgy celebrated by Episcopalians there. Three years ago, Wetzel’s photographs were published in a book titled, “Through the Window of the Ordinary: Experiences of Holy Week.”

Her black-and-white photographs will be on display from Palm Sunday through Easter at Trinity Episcopal Church in Castine.

“Of all the liturgies I encountered [at St. James in Chicago], I was especially struck by the visual power of the ancient rites of Holy Week, the most important celebrations of the Christian year,” Wetzel says in the forward to her book.

“I found myself wanting to use my camera to explore all the fascinating contrasts in these services: the interplay of darkness and light; the juxtaposition of the familiar and the strange; moments of inwardness, isolation, intimacy, and communion; the vulnerable human being moving in community to encounter the mystery of God.

“All of these feelings were very new to me. I had never before understood the full significance of each liturgy: the wonderful exuberance of Palm Sunday, which is the journey’s beginning; the intimacy and informality of Maundy Thursday’s foot-washing, with the very quiet ending at the Altar of Repose; the solemn intensity of Good Friday; and, ultimately, the wonderfully uplifting, celebratory atmosphere of the Easter Vigil and Easter Day. I was eager to capture each with its own particular, sometimes peculiar, and always deeply moving signs and symbols, rituals and moments.”

In the meantime, her work in photography took her to England, where in 1998 she photographed the 13th Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican bishops from around the world

The gathering in Canterbury was, at times, contentious, pitting the North American and European bishops against those from Africa, Asia and South America over sexuality issues.

In the midst of that discord, Wetzel found a way to visualize the fundamental unity of faith within the worldwide Anglican Communion.

She photographed the individual crosses worn by 42 of the bishops, including Bishop Chilton Knudsen of the Episcopal Diocese of Maine, who was among those attending. The color photographs of the crosses were reproduced as a poster.

The photographer regularly lends the pictures taken at the cathedral in Chicago to churches to exhibit during Holy Week. They have been displayed at Episcopal churches in Philadelphia and Seattle and in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Wetzel hopes that people will find new meaning in the familiar liturgies through the photographs as she and her co-author did.

For information on the photo exhibit call Trinity Episcopal Church, Castine, at 326-4180.

Notes on The Sunday of The Passion: Palm Sunday

“It all begins here, again, as if for the first time. When we step into the liturgy of Palm Sunday, we step over the threshold into Holy Week, a week of liturgies which carry us deeply into the experiences of Jesus and his disciples in the time of his Passion and death. We move beyond the limitations of here and now; the curtain between the sensory world and the world of eternity dissolves, and we pass through it.

“We gather in anticipation and excitement. The liturgy begins with palms and a spirited, raucous procession with shouts of “Hosanna!” and a sense of festival. We are like that throng of pilgrims who greeted Jesus as he rode a donkey down the slope of the Mount of Olives, across the Kidron Valley, and up into the streets of Jerusalem. But the mood of the liturgy shifts abruptly as soon as we arrive. The Passion is proclaimed; the journey to Jerusalem has led us, as it led Jesus, to the desolation and death of the Cross. In our prayers, we ask God to keep us faithful to the end.

“We celebrate the Eucharist, proclaiming our faith that the Cross is not the end of this road, but the costly, painful place of dying to ourselves and rising to new life in Christ. And so the Palm Sunday liturgy poignantly concludes with the hope that Holy Week will be for us a movement deep into the transforming Paschal Mystery of the death and Resurrection of Christ. But difficult, testing work lies ahead of us before we emerge from this week into Easter.

“We have entered the liminal time and space of Holy Week and its liturgies. What will become of us if we allow ourselves to be drawn into and transformed by the power of these days? We are about to find out.”

From “Through the Window of the Ordinary: Experiences of Holy Week,” text by Janet B. Campbell, photos by Anne Wetzel, Church Publishing Inc., 146 pages.