Review:
Among contemporary photographers, Frank Monaco has been granted an unusual degree of access to the lives of monks and nuns. His stewardship of this gift has produced images of uncommon beauty, collected in Brothers and Sisters: Glimpses of the Cloistered Life. Novelist Ron Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy) notes in the foreword that "The happiness that men and women find in consecrated, cloistered life is what surprises outsiders most." Happiness does radiate from the black-and-white photographs depicting monks and nuns of various traditions (from Carthusians to Poor Clares) washing windows, reading, gardening, making music, and tending graves. Most of the images are accompanied by excerpts from the orders that structure cloistered lives, such as the following, from St. Teresa of Avila's Way of Perfection: "And if you are in the kitchen, our Lord moves among the pots and pans." Frank Monaco's photographs are composed with a joyful simplicity that is probably hard earned and certainly well suited to his subjects' lives. --Michael Joseph Gross
About the Author:
FRANK MONACO, born in New York, has lived in Europe since 1950 and now resides in London. A foreign correspondent for many years for Jubilee magazine, he has been associated with Rex Features, the London photo agency, which has placed his photographs in more than 400 periodicals throughout the world. His work has been the subject of one-man exhibitions in the United States, the UK and India. He is currently working on his fourth book, on the temples of India.
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