Beverly Hall, photographer

Always a profoundly spiritual person, Beverly finally struck out for divinity school in 1998. A self-defined "seeker," she was, she says, looking for a new identity, something beyond Beverly Hall Photography. She earned her master of divinity degree at the Episcopal Divinity School in 2002. “I came out of the closet as a believer,” she says of the experience. She also came away from her four years in Cambridge with an unexpected and renewed “appreciation for my art.”

That art weaves in and out of her spiritual life. It has carried over into the home she and her architect husband Sascha Illich have created on Tennessee Avenue in Madaket. Once just a fishing shanty on Hither Creek, she says “[their home] went from a tiny shack to a rather large extension.” Together they have masterminded there what she calls a transparent home”—where all windows look out on water or garden and the outside is as ordered and deliberate as extended “rooms.” “I’m always moving the ‘furniture’—stones, plants, trees, statues, tchotchkes—in the garden,” she says.

A lover of things in threes—of altars, of stones, of separation and integration, of silence, of prayer, and of safe places—Beverly, with Sascha’s technical skills and guidance, has made a “soul place,” as she calls it, of her garden and her home. With the exception of a few sassafras trees, she says, “we have rooted everything here.” Including themselves.Roots are of the utmost importance to Beverly. “My eye is restless. I am a restless spirit,” she says.

Which brings to mind a favorite quotation of Beverly’s, from Albert Camus:

A work of art is nothing less

than this long journeying

to find again through the labyrinth of art

the two or three simple and great images

upon which, once, the heart first opened.

http://www.beverlyhallphotography.net/Families3.html