There is a particular estrangement in the way faith clings to architecture. Not the spectacle of cathedrals or the photogenic austerity of brutalist churches, but the humble annexation of spaces that were never meant to be sacred. In Temple Road, Josefine Rauch doesn’t simply document a place; she maps the psychic residue of diasporic faith—lived, provisional, and often invisible.

Set on the outskirts of Frankfurt in a zone more likely to be associated with logistics companies and meatpacking plants than liturgy, the titular “Temple Road” isn’t an official street name but a kind of poetic shorthand Rauch uses to gesture toward a collective topography: an industrial enclave where warehouses become places of worship every Sunday. Here, churches exist not as dominant civic symbols but as temporal, ad-hoc sanctuaries—multipurpose spaces breathing out incense and fluorescent light.

The project emerged almost accidentally. While en route to a printing house, Rauch encountered “well-dressed people disappearing behind closed doors.” Her photographer’s instinct—restless, inquisitive, tender—compelled her return. “I was struck by how this utilitarian space quietly transformed into something communal and spiritual,” she recalls. And thus began a two-year ritual of observation, a quiet witnessing that resists both anthropological distance and sentimentalism.

“I was struck by how this utilitarian space quietly transformed into something communal and spiritual.”

What Rauch captures in her images is not an exoticized ethnography of belief, but an attunement to subtle thresholds: the tension between visibility and erasure, sacred and profane, inside and outside. Her lens lingers on the unnoticed, the nearly banal—concrete thresholds, muted tiling, the plastic glare of a cross backlit by warehouse fluorescents. And then, unexpectedly, a woman in pink—tattooed, defiant, maternal—leaning against a rusting fence, becoming emblematic of the hybrid identities rooted in these spaces. These are not portraits of people but of presences.

Each congregation, she notes, "reflects the unique cultural and spiritual expressions" of its community, yet none of them appear didactic or codified. A statue of the Virgin, chipped at the base, presides over a bed of desiccated soil and red brick. A makeshift altar flanked by velvet curtains stages a ritual of transformation more theatrical than ecclesiastical. Rauch’s compositions are not just visual but atmospheric, thick with emotional ambiguity.

If religion here appears fractured, tentative, or improvised, it’s precisely this condition that makes Temple Road so politically resonant. These aren’t monumental institutions but communities displaced by gentrification and held together by mutual care and borrowed space. “Many congregations... had to leave former locations due to rising rents, redevelopment, or complaints from neighbors,” Rauch explains. Faith, in this context, is not a performance of power but of endurance. These churches exist in a state of ontological illegibility—both hyper-visible in their aesthetic traces and invisible within dominant urban narratives.

The spiritual, in Rauch’s work, is never grandiose. It’s embedded in texture—curtains parting like stage drapery, a chair framed like an icon, a woman’s pink hairclip catching the sun. Faith is not found in the spectacle, but in the interstitial: in waiting, arriving, assembling.

There is something distinctly European about this project—its quiet skepticism, its avoidance of declarative closure—but there is also something Californian in its cinematographic warmth and its allegiance to the periphery. Rauch’s time in Los Angeles clearly inflects her gaze. She describes being drawn to “overlooked or transitional spaces—places where ordinary life becomes quietly profound.” Temple Road is precisely that: a study in the quiet profundity of the unremarkable, a visual theology of liminality.

In an era where photography often rushes to produce clarity or meaning, Rauch dares to dwell in ambiguity. As she puts it: “I’m most engaged when there’s a sense of emotional ambiguity—when something resists being fully understood.” That resistance is what gives her work its charge. Temple Road doesn’t explain itself—it invites you to stand at the threshold, listen to the echoes, and reconsider what it means for something to be sacred.