Relics 2016: Chackbay Church

Thank the lucky stars and the cold skies that John Crifasi had his camera with him on this January day, when a drive down Highway 20 took him through a stretch of Chackbay. There, the roadside foliage was thinned to scarcity by winter and no longer hid the old St. Luke Baptist Church.

Crifasi knew about the church; he’d seen it in a bridal portrait in which the girl in her gown stood inside the building, stark among the age and decay, and the photographer captured her through a window. “I thought, If I could ever find that church, I’d take some pictures of it,” said Crifasi.

After he’d taken the photograph, a friend tracked down the abandoned building’s backstory in an August 2008 Houma Times article about a group of Nicholls State students who developed their own fascination for the building. The church, they learned, was erected on a lot of the former Cleona Plantation as the Little Zion Baptist Church, incorporated in 1891. Sold in 1907, the building remained the St. Luke Baptist Church until it was shuttered in the 1960s. Not two years after Crifasi took his photo in 2010, the caving structure was dismantled for good.

Crifasi stays vigilant for the hidden stories of South Louisiana’s landscapes, but he makes frequent use of his passport, too, thanks to his wife Terri’s work in travel. “She’s taken me some places I never thought I’d see,” he said. 

The couple has been as far south as the Antarctic Peninsula and as far east as Dubai; abroad, they work in tandem to make images. “I know the lighting and the composition I want, and she’s great with the details,” said Crifasi, who credits his wife with researching optimum vantage points for the visions in his mind’s eye. “To us, it’s like a hunting expedition sometimes.” 

View more of Crifasi’s work at johncrifasiphotography.com. Find the Houma Times story on the St. Luke Baptist Church at bit.ly/1R3JOFX. Details on submitting to "Relics" here.