I first heard about Corpus Christi Church almost by accident.
I was in Quinter, Kansas, on my way to Colorado when I met a woman whose father had been a member of the church. She told me about Mooney Creek, and the story stuck with me enough that I started looking into it after I got home.
Getting access took a little more planning. I exchanged several emails with the priest at Corpus Christi to get permission to photograph the church and arrange access.
The project ended up taking two separate trips. On the first, I concentrated on the interior. The second trip was for the exterior photographs.
Mooney Creek is about 70 miles from Spring Hill, so it is close enough to reach without turning the day into an expedition, but far enough away that it feels removed from the Kansas City area. That distance is part of what appealed to me. It gave me time to think about the place before I arrived and again on the drive home.
What interested me most was the character of the church itself. Places like this carry evidence of the people who built them, used them, cared for them, and remembered them. Photographing the interior and exterior on different days also gave me two different ways of looking at the same place.
The interior photographs became more about detail, quiet, light, and the feeling of the space. The exterior photographs were more about where the church sits in the landscape and how it relates to its surroundings.
This was one of those projects that began with a conversation and gradually became something I wanted to document more carefully.
That’s one of the reasons I enjoy photographing places. Sometimes the photograph starts long before the camera comes out.
See the complete collection of photographs from Corpus Christi Catholic Church at Mooney Creek.