Photographs by Herman Ellis Dyal explores his childhood church in Texas

Located a few miles from the Alamo on San Antonio’s south side, Riverside Baptist Church consists of a modest complex of brick structures built over the course of several decades. The sanctuary’s engaged portico expresses vaguely classical details and is flanked by an educational building and a fellowship hall that more explicitly reflect the eras of their construction. But the photographs collected in The Things Not Seen Are Eternal do not dwell on the exterior of these buildings. Instead, they explore the seen and unseen artifacts found in their vast, depopulated interiors.

The photographer, Herman Ellis Dyal, spent much of his childhood inside Riverside Baptist Church. As explained in a concise essay appending the collection of documentary photos published by GOST Books in April, the 1950s of his youth was “the high-water mark of institutional Christianity in Eisenhower’s America, and we were in one of the city’s largest and fastest-growing churches.”

But just as Dyal’s own beliefs have changed since then, so too has the prominence of community churches like the one he attended. As its congregation dwindled in the second half of the 20th century, the faithful retreated into ever-smaller portions of the large complex of buildings it once saw fit to build. Even so, the disused portions of the church retained evidence of their past use, and these semiabandoned spaces became the focus of Dyal’s photographic study.

Dust to Dust

A new book of photographs by architect Herman Ellis Dyal explores his childhood church in Texas

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