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Biographical Profile
Anthony-Francis
Anthony-Francis is a life-vowed and consecrated hermit monk of the Episcopal Church; part of the world-wide Anglican Communion. He is a visionary and a photographic artist whose works speak of life and movement, spirit and form. He became attuned to nature, music and art early in childhood in Irvington, New Jersey during the 1940’s. In light he saw forms, in trees he felt life, in animals a special communication.
As a youngster he was profound and introspective, always expressing himself through some form of art, whether it was transforming an alarm clock into a planter or painting an abstract picture of a checkerboard that revealed the moves of a previous game.
After the early stage of “cigar-box / wax paper” cameras his dad had made for him, he was gifted with his first “real” camera at age eleven. He experimented with it and learned on his own until 1967 when he enrolled in the Germain School of Photography in New York. There he studied with many prominent photographers, one of whom was Mark Bomse, a former Steuben Glass photographer who taught him the very delicate lighting techniques needed to create sparkle and definition in that very elusive and ethereal object.
In 1970 he was graduated with honors for “Outstanding Achievement in Commercial Photography” for the creation of “East River Tug,” a charcoal sketch effect in this medium. Later he became the Formal Pet Portraitist for Hammacher Schlemmer & Company and photographer for Dogs Magazine.
The 1970’s were also a time of dramatic change in his life. It began with a return to nature and music which led to prayer and meditation. In 1974 he had a spiritual conversion experience that changed his life forever, bringing forth ministries of Healing, and eventually, Pastoral Care and Spiritual Direction.
From 1974 to 1980, he contributed greatly to the shape of the Healing Ministry at Trinity Church at Wall Street, St. Paul’s Chapel, both in lower Manhattan, and at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Throughout this time he also ministered with cancer patients in one-on-one relationships in a routine of requested house and hospital visits. The 1990’s called him to minister with AIDS patients, volunteering himself at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, in what was to become an extraordinary and rich experience for the patient, their families and himself.
Anthony-Francis is a 1991 honor graduate of New York Theological Seminary, earning a “Certificate in Christian Ministry” and was awarded honors in “Pastoral Care” and in “Christian Ethics.” He is also a 1998 graduate of the School for Charismatic Spiritual Directors at Our Lady of Guadalupe Abbey in Pecos, New Mexico.
Across these time periods, Anthony-Francis had given lectures on healing and meditation at Trinity Church at Wall Street, the New School for Social Research and to graduates of the Silva Mind Control Course.
From time to time, he also conducted Music Meditations for small groups of people, stimulating inner spiritual awareness and development of what he terms, “Active Prayer: Being and becoming an active participant in the unity and oneness of creation.”
(© Br. Anthony-Francis 1974)
It is this sensitivity that weaves its way through his life, enabling him to bring an inner vision to an outward form in a manner that can be shared with all humanity. And it is this that forms the basis of his photographic art.
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