Monks part of '24 Hours in Cyberspace': Jesuit photographer also joins effort to document Internet

National Catholic Reporter, Feb 9, 1996 by Pamela Schaeffer

No doubt it was Reality that attracted Jesuit Fr. Don Doll and Trappist Br. Benedict Simmonds to their respective religious vocations. But it is virtual reality that will be engaging them in the early days of February.

Although they have never met, they will be bonded through a common experience in cyberspace -- a world whose workings are surely, for many of us, as mysterious as the mind of God.

On Feb. 8, target date for a project called "24 Hours in Cyberspace," hundreds of photographers around the world are scheduled to focus on subjects whose lives have been changed by the Internet. Among the photographers is Doll. Among the subjects are Simmonds and his 25 fellow monks at Holy Cross Abbey in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Meanwhile, people with the right stuff -- meaning equipment, savvy and time -- will be able to view the results on line, via a special World Wide Web site (http://www.cyber24.com) as the pictures are uploaded the day of the shoot. A team of editors will update the web site throughout the day. Project overseers promise a quick access over pipelines expected to triple Internet access on that day. Later the photographs and companion essays will be published as a book/CD-ROM package by Against All Odds Productions.

Both the company and the project are brainchildren of photojournalist-entrepreneur-publisher Rick Smolan, who executed A Day in the Life of America and a host of similar coffee-table photo books including A Day in the Life of Ireland, Italy and Russia and Passage to Vietnam.

Doll was invited to work on the project because of his skills as a photojournalist and his 30-year relationship with Native Americans, beginning with a teaching assignment at the Jesuit-run St. Francis Indian Mission School on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota.

Asked by his order to do some publicity shots, he struggled to learn photography and taught it to his students. He's been photographing Native Americans ever since, earning some awards along the way. He has continued to teach -- for the past 27 years at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., a Jesuit school.

A way to stay in touch

Smolan's A Day in the Life of America, published a decade ago, included Doll's photograph of Oliver Red Cloud painting red crosses in preparation for Memorial Day. While working on that project, Doll met Gerald Clifford, an Oglala Sioux, who will be Doll's subject for the Feb. 8 shoot.

Part of Doll's assignment for the A Day in the Life of America project was to shoot Native Americans at Wounded Knee. Clifford lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where he directs the Rural Water Project, a $38 million government enterprise that involves piping water from the Missouri River to the reservation. He is also an experienced computer user and is getting his master's in business administration through the University of Phoenix On-line.

The long-distance program, involving on-line "chats" with professors and fellow students and papers transmitted by E-mail, allows Clifford to remain on the reservation with his wife, Charlotte Black Elk, and their five children. He can continue working and stay in touch with his native traditions.

Clifford is also involved with a World Wide Web site at Oglala Lakota Community College, a school located on the Oglala Sioux reservation. "He talked about it this way," said Doll. "His people were nomadic in the past, and their nomadic life made it possible for them to have plenty of communication with other tribes. He feels the Internet is giving his people that capability again. They can tell their own stories on the web site, give information they want out there to the world, to the globe."

Doll has done some books of his own: Crying for a Vision, a chronicle of suffering past and present on the Rosebud Reservation, published in the mid-1970s, and Vision Quest: Men, Women and Sacred Sites of the Sioux Nation, published by Crown in 1994.

For that book, he logged over 75,000 miles on his truck during three years, aiming to report on "a new sense of pride" among Native Americans who were taking charge of their lives and getting in touch with their traditions. But the real journey, he wrote in the introduction, was "an inner one." Prayer became an integral part of the project, he wrote, a source of courage for the initial calls and of inspiration for his interviews with the Native Americans and for his photographic work.

Home fires burning

Doll has titled his contribution to the cyberspace project "Keeping the Home Fires Burning." His photographs will document Clifford's daily life at work and at home.

The creative process is interwoven with prayer, says Doll, who found courage to trust his own insights from a few sentences in Thomas Merton's Seeds of Contemplation.

"How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading someone else's life," Merton wrote. "You must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone.... It takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the man or the artist that God intended you to be."