|
Art
The art of
contemplation
By NCR Staff
The traditional nun picture was an action photo. The photographer
shot the nuns teaching, healing, cooking or, on certain breezy occasions,
playing soccer - invariably doing something, an anomaly considering the
contemplative impulse that inspired all the action.
Photographer Clara Gutsches The Convent Series
shows something else:The sisters slowed down. In a sense they stopped their
world. Twenty-five convents, most of them cloistered, in the province of
Quebec, Canada, opened their doors to the photographer. Rarely have we
seen a camera approach a world so silent and render images so evocative and
full of meaning, writes museum director France Gascon, who first
exhibited the photos in Quebec.
They are on exhibition through June 11 at the Center for Creative
Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a prestigious museum and
research center that houses the collections of such greats as Ansel Adams and
Richard Avedon.
Gutsche was born in St. Louis but has been living in Montreal for
the past 30 years. At the beginning, she was interested only in convent
interiors, Gascon explains. However, as the project progressed
during the 1990s, the photographer increasingly focused on individuals as she
began to devote her attention primarily to contemplative communities.
The nuns she depicts are more traditional, or perhaps timeless,
than contemporary or trendy. They represent a part of the Catholic church that
may be departing for good. Gascon again: [Gutsche] often photographs an
era that - for social, political, cultural reasons - has collapsed into the
past or escaped the present.
It is not about holding onto time past but
about exploring what time has left behind for us.
Time exists primarily
as it is experienced in relationships between people, and between these people
and their milieu.
National Catholic Reporter, May 19,
2000
|
|