ABSTRACT
‘Shooting’ can be a conduit or facility, as well as a threat to communicating a monastic identity. The method of reflecting on the images is inspired by auto-ethnography. Carolyn Ellis describes the type of academic work as ‘research, writing, narrative and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political’. Images form a way of expressing the narrative of the author’s transition that is quite comparable to the role auto-ethnographic diaries has in research models. The shooting turned the monastic vacuum the author was living in into a virtue for the spectators: an essential moment in a personal setting that is shown in a depersonalised way. The interaction between creative writing and a creative use of the camera made taking the pictures a true form of monastic photography. The sacredness constructed by the mystifying and sanctifying qualities of shooting is imperative for the question of how monastic identity is represented in imagery.
