An Enduring Spirit: the Photography of Thomas Merton

10 An Enduring Spirit: The Photography of Thomas Merton. by Anthony Bannon In a very short period of time, Thomas Merton established a remarkable ability to create some haunting, often profoundly affecting, photographs - images that are gathering respect in aesthetic and in spiritual arenas. They are preserved in the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY, over 1300 in all. The best among them are images of enduring spirit, of light on the bough, of the ravages of time and endurance of hope found in abandoned things, of diverse dramas at the borders of understanding. While some of Merton' s photographs are commonplace, some others take your breath away. Within the shifting cultural landscape of the mid 196os, Merton carne into his own as a photographer. He had always made photographs, back at least to his college days at Columbia, but beginning about 1965, he focused upon making images that would serve as more than just a record. These images, made late in his life, expressed a rich interior vision, an awareness likely built upon a learned foundation of Zen and a desire to discover new avenues toward contemplation. Merton's interest m Eastern philosophy during this period of time - and his conversations with the photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (and with his long time Columbia friend, the minimalist artist Ad Reinhardt) - compel reference to Zen thought. It is an approach that is useful in Figure 1 understanding the contemplative quality of his images. Merton's photographs range from abstracted formalist views of nature to even more aesthetically vigorous and contemplatively mysterious depictions. The direct, wordless quality (Fig. 1) of these haunting images strip any of the illusionistic powers of the photograph and forces awareness of the photograph as photograph, sidestepping considerations of symbolic representation, or conventional exposure as a record of place, person or event. 11 The dialectic of the shadow (Fig. 2), for example, is a significant theme in Merton's work- the play oflight against dark, the twinning of the thing and its thrown image, the notion of presence and absence, of self and other, the thing and its trace, the object and its abstraction, the drawing out of an image. And these Figure 2 conceits find an echo in the thousands of quick lined Zen-like drawings he also made during his lifetime. Interestingly, the implied transformation of the thrown image is one carried by photography itself, and is one of the mediums defining attributes. For photography, with its near magical qualities, is designed to carry the trace of light reflected from the represented thing and impress it upon the light sensitive emulsion of film negative, which, in tum, renders light as darkness, Figure 3 just like a shadow. The photograph as transformation, then, as a kind of shadow itself, fits Merton's work like a glove. This rhetoric of comparison and contrast continues throughout Merton's photography - in the balance of a wall of windows with a projected shadow (Fig. 3) and in the contrast of grass against barn, the new against the old (Fig. 4). The old barn against the new grass, the light against the dark, the inte1twining of two different trees, a white chair in a dark iris Figure 4 12 of light (Fig. 5), the framed image (Fig. 6), an admission of culture, the hand of a maker - these are key units in Merton's growing photographic vocabulary. In his hands, the camera and its processes provide a rich poetics. Once impressed, the film is removed from the camera (its chamber) for development; and then it is imprinted for sharing. By its very process, making a photograph climbs over and Figure 5 out of one reality and into another, transcending, overstepping bounds, indeed abstracting the reality observed, pressing it into another form, the film form, a two dimensional trace of a three dimensional experience, this one, the film form, now stripped of accustomed sensations - of sound, taste, smell, movement. Photographs are fiat, small, and flimsy, brief and venial constructions that will not yield to normal testing. We cannot pass through them, or into them, or behind the objects the photograph presents. The image transcends that dimensional reality to .create another Figure 6 reality, derived from the photographer's qualities of mind and spirit. The photographer's powers of organization, and of sentiment and emotion and divination, present another view, this photographic view, an often stilled life. 13 Merton was skilled at that stilled life image, one caught in a stasis of time, often between things, a rock split by growing plants (Fig. 7); or mass growing from a tree, itself split open (Fig. 8), a counterpose between this and that, a proposition of change, a siting of that place where media mix, perhaps between earth and sky, sea Figure 7 and shore, where life happens in abundance. Merton seemed to catch and hold the gap between, and in that place, as if between the lines of a metaphor, or in the midst of a syllogism, or at the bend of an edit in film, we are taken to a place we had not anticipated, where meanings are made. Actually, meanings may begin in these depicted places, and be recorded on film, but finally, meanings are made in the transaction between the mind of the creating artist and the mind Figure 8 of the perceiving viewer, who, recognizing the structure of the image, reconcile the pose of the difference and make something different out of it, considering both the image and the object, taking notjust the photography but also the idea, taking not just the idea, but also the invitation for contemplation. In this process, one makes a partnership with the artist, and one discovers opportunity for transformation, if not transcendence. We trust the photograph for its verisimilar qualities. It is a cultural practice. We believe in it. And it is a trust that we extend often against a lot of better evidence. We 14 extend this trust because of the photograph's extraordinary abilities to stand in a unique way for whatever it represents. lts representative power is so strong, in fact, that we often refer to the photograph as the thing itself rather than as a picture of a thing itself. That much is known from observation, sensible from experience and grandly overstated and trusted. The double standard of the medium, easily the most compelling fact about photography, is that while it rests securely upon the expectancy of a very special candor - like a death mask or finger print, with which it shares the iconicity of tracing that which it represents - it also offers itself from behind a veil of innocence for emotionally, intellectually and spiritually transporting creations and, yes, beguiling lies. Photographs are crafted, clearly chosen representations produced less as evidence of a pass age of events or even of lives then to assert the presence of the photographer and the photographer's ideas. In the contemplative photographs he made at Gethsemani, in distinction to pictures he made elsewhere, Merton shares the places, he said, where he "encountered the deepest mystery of my own life." 1 Indeed, the sober, direct, and reflective values in Merton's work at Gethsemani establishes for us, as likely for him, a language for contemplation. Just as Merton acknowledged in his writing the importance of the landscape for his contemplation, his photographs were created as a vehicle for praise and love, expressive of what he called "the urgency of seeing, fully aware, experiencing what is here."2 His reflections, in fact, were often very photographic, mindful of time, as when he noted: This day will not come again. The young bulls lie under a tree in the corner of their field. Quiet afternoon. Blue hills. Day lilies nod in the wind. This day will not come again.3 His photographs, like his writing, appear as a witness, attentive to simple things, aware of the dark woods on the hills called knobs, aware that the woods were in shadow, and we are invited to follow out the idea of these images, from shadow to light, from density 1 Thorrns Merton, Conjectures ofa Guilty Bystander, (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 234. 2 Thomas Merton, Turning Toward the World: 7/ie Pivotal Years, ed. Victor A. Kramer (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996), 123. 3 Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 34. 15 to simplicity, presence to absence. These things that he contemplated, the scenes that he photographed, these are saints, he wrote - the mountains, the dogwood outside his window, the rock praising God, being the best rock it can be. The fields and the forms within them give entryto contemplation, a reflection aided by their depiction, rendered directly, unmediated by the symbolic codes of language. The simple dialectic in many of these Figure 9 images reflect the dialectics in Me1ton's life at this time. For during this period, from 1965 until the end of his life, Merton also considered the contest of solitude versus community, the East versus the West, the world and the church, the old Church and the new Church, and, of course, the issues of peace and race that were dividing the United States. Me1ton's images, like those times, are more demanding, than a quick glance, more intricate than a simple focus upon a primary object suggests. The variety of textures across a limited palette of black and white, the deep shadow and decisive light, these elements of his work call a viewer to an informed reflection. Figure 10 These are not simply trees against the sky (Fig. 9), or a bush against a barn (Fig.

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