In the summer of 1990, Carl De Keyzer bought a camper van and spent a year crossing the United States, photographing the intensity and public expression of American religious life. The resulting series, God Inc., was published in 1992. Three decades later, he returned to the Bible Belt and other states to examine how religious communities had accommodated contemporary life and adopted new technologies in their efforts to reach followers.

God Inc I & II places these two bodies of work in direct relation. The interval is central: rather than treating religion as an unchanging national characteristic, the book establishes a comparison between distinct historical moments. De Keyzer’s documentary approach attends to belief as a lived and organized social experience—something enacted through communities, institutions and changing methods of communication. The later photographs do not simply extend the earlier project; together, the series make visible both persistence and transformation.

The publication’s structure gives that comparison a physical form. God Inc. I and God Inc. II are bound into a 320-page reversible volume with two covers, allowing each sequence to retain its own point of entry while remaining inseparable from the other. The earlier section also includes photographs not published in the original book. Issued by Lannoo Publishers to accompany a 2020 exhibition in Ghent, the volume gathers the project across its full thirty-year span.

For collectors, its importance rests not on claims of scarcity but on the unusual duration and construction of the work. Few photographic projects can confront their original subject again after such an interval and present both encounters as parallel, materially linked sequences. The book therefore functions as more than a survey of American religion: it is also a study of documentary return, historical comparison and the ways a photographer’s archive can be reopened through new work and revised editing.