Newly-released research into the state of the religious orders in Ireland has shown that their numbers are now in serious decline, with more than two-thirds of the membership over the age of 60. There could scarcely be a better moment, therefore, for the appearance of a book celebrating that not-so-distant moment when monks and nuns were, if not quite abundant, certainly more commonly found throughout Europe. Brothers and Sisters is a self-explanatory collection of photographs taken by Frank Monaco over several decades and countries.
A well-known photo-journalist for the past half century, Monaco was born in New York of Italian parents and embarked on his successful career in the early 1950s after first trying both advertising and painting. His earliest work was a collection of images of Cantalupo, in southern Italy, from which his family had emigrated.
These pictures were eventually published together as The Women of Molise, but meanwhile Monaco had begun to work for a US religious publication, Jubilee. One of his assignments was to take photographs in the Italian Carthusian monastery of Serra San Bruno. Visits to other religious houses followed, including Mount Melleray, in Co Waterford, in 1981 when he was taking pictures for a book on this country.
While many of Monaco's photographs taken among male religious orders were published in 1983 in They Dwell in Monasteries, until now, a selection of his work in convents has never appeared. He remembers how, when starting to photograph nuns - with the permission of the Papal See - an abbess warned him: "The sisters might possibly give a grudging assent to some photographs of the house, and even to one or other sister as long as she remain 'faceless'."
In fact, as his new book shows, a great many nuns were happy to have their faces photographed, perhaps because Monaco always made a policy of giving each religious house a complete set of prints for its archive. Given that most of these establishments now hold only a handful of occupants, his pictures must be all the more poignant.
Raised a Catholic and through his mother a distant relative of Padre Pio, Monaco says he still has his faith, although without attending any church service for the past 15 years. And despite all the years of photographing religious orders - and even making a television documentary on the subject in the early 1970s - he never felt any desire to join their number. He remembers entering a cell in that first Carthusian monastery and being confronted by a large black cross; "any romantic ideas I'd had were dispelled at that moment".
Clearly he admires without wishing to emulate the men and women who enter these houses.
Monaco will be 84 in December but still travels with a Leica M6 camera in his pocket. Since the 1960s, he has been associated with Rex Features, the photographic agency in London, where he also lives. Of late, he has taken to visiting India and expects to be back there again before the end of the year, as he intends the country's temples to be the subject of his next book. Despite his age, he shows no signs of losing interest in taking photographs or finding fresh subjects. "With the camera," he says, "I look, I see."
Brothers and Sisters is published by The Collins Press. Price £15.
