The Proselytizer inhabits street corners with the same certainty that drove prophets into public squares centuries ago. This archetype pulses through the collective unconscious: the messenger who must speak, who believes silence equals complicity. The series doesn’t romanticize this figure. It tracks how conviction curdles into coercion, how the impulse to save souls can twist into something punishing and small.

These images refuse to flatten the archetype into hero or villain. Cassandra spoke truth and was ignored. John the Baptist prepared the way. Zarathustra upended everything. All proselytizers, all operating from belief so intense it demanded audience. But the shadow lives right alongside that light, and the work doesn’t look away. Bigotry dressed as salvation. Homophobia packaged as concern. The street preacher screaming damnation at strangers becomes a distortion of the same archetypal energy that once carried genuine revelation. The series captures both poles without collapsing the distance between them.

The street becomes the arena where this tension plays out daily. Believers stake their ground. Passersby navigate around them, avoid or engage. The photographs frame these encounters as collisions between private certainty and public indifference, between the need to convert and the exhaustion of being targeted. The Proselytizer persists because the drive to spread truth, real or imagined, runs deep in human wiring. The work asks what happens when that drive meets a world that’s learned to tune it out, and whether conviction without listeners is prophecy or just noise.