Thomas Merton, photographer monk

archival image

Merton's major contact to the world of photography was Shirley Burden, a convert to Catholicism who had first come to Gethsemani Abbey to shoot a book for postulants interested in entering there. He also provided the photo on the cover of Merton's Selected Poems (Pearson).
Later, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York asked Burden to return to Gethsemane and take more photos. What resulted was a remarkable book. God is my Life was published in 1960, Merton wrote the introduction.
It is a powerful evocation of daily life at the Trappist abbey on the eve of the radical changes that were to come after the Second Vatican Council. The photographs accentuate the austerity of the monks' lives and show them almost always in the context of manual labor, although the book also contains a few exquisitely beautiful liturgical shots.
In his postscript, Burden wrote that he had been fascinated by "fourteen hundred acres, two hundred men, and God."
By the time Merton published his own photography (e.g. The Call to Emptiness), he was in his eremitical phase. Reviewer Robert Bonazzi calles these "mystical photographs." The last three years of his life saw him working intensely as a photographer. He started with cheap cameras or ones that were loaned to him, until the famous photographer John Howard Griffin gave him one (they called it an indefinite loan). 

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- Robert Bonazzi: Review of A Hidden Wholeness: The Visual World of Thomas Merton by Thomas Merton, John Howard Griffin. Southwest Review 56.1 (1971) 86-90.
- Paul Pearson: "Thomas Merton: Photographer." On merton.org.