A camera goes into a convent nobody may leave

LISIEUX, Normandy, September 14, 1894 AD — Céline Martin walked into the Carmel of Lisieux this week carrying a camera. Most convents in France would have stopped her at the door with it. They thought taking pictures was a silly hobby. The prioress here is Céline’s sister, Mother Agnes of Jesus, and she let the camera through.

Céline is twenty-five. She came in on September 14. Her father, Saint Louis Martin, had died less than seven weeks before. Her youngest sister, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, has been a nun in this house since she was fifteen. St. Thérèse is twenty-one now. The nuns here do not go out, and almost nobody gets in.

Until this week only two pictures existed of St. Thérèse as a nun. A priest took them five years ago, when the bishop let him in to look at the roof.

Céline’s camera makes one picture at a time, on a sheet of glass coated with chemicals. The holder that slides the glass into the camera takes two sheets at once. That is why so many of her pictures come in near-twins. Céline photographed the same nuns, in the same corner of the same yard, one shot straight after the other.

Nine seconds without moving

The lenses were not bright enough, and the glass plates were not sensitive enough either. One picture took about nine seconds. Father François de Sainte-Marie wrote the opening pages of the album of Céline’s photographs. He asked what those nine seconds do to a person: “How do you stay yourself during all this time?” The sisters in her pictures look stiff and solemn. In some of the group ones a nun moved and came out as a smudge.

Her first pictures came that November, when the trees were already bare. In one of them St. Thérèse stands with four other nuns at the foot of a flight of steps. They lead up to the infirmary, the room where sick nuns are nursed. The second picture came off the other sheet of glass in the same pair. Céline is in that one, near the steps with her back to the camera.

Over the next three years Céline took pictures of almost everything the nuns did. She set up in the sacristy courtyard and under the chestnut trees. She worked at the washhouse too, where the sisters rinsed the laundry. Céline brought the pictures out of the plates by soaking them in chemicals in the dark. She did it in a darkroom she put together from whatever the house had.

Three times in the same courtyard

By June 1897 St. Thérèse had tuberculosis, a disease of the lungs, and she could barely stay on her feet. The nuns wanted a picture of her anyway. The picture was to be a present for the prioress, Mother Marie de Gonzague. Her feast day fell on June 21.

On June 7 St. Thérèse came out into the sacristy courtyard to be photographed. She held two small pictures from her prayer book, the Child Jesus in one hand and the Holy Face in the other. Each one matched half of her name as a nun: Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face.

Céline carried the plates down to a cellar nearby and brought the pictures out of them at once. She did not like the first two. So St. Thérèse came back out into the courtyard. She was worn out, but she held still a third time, another nine seconds, with the two pictures in her hands. St. Thérèse sent a print of that third one out of the convent. It went to a young man who was training to be a missionary priest. It was the last picture of her on her feet.

On August 30 Céline took one more picture of her alive. St. Thérèse was propped up on pillows in the covered walk outside the infirmary. St. Thérèse died on September 30, 1897 AD, at twenty-four. Céline took two more pictures of her after that. One was in the infirmary the next day. The other was in the choir two days later.

St. Thérèse’s own book about her life, Story of a Soul, came out the year after she died. Céline’s pictures were printed in it. Forty-seven photographs of St. Thérèse of Lisieux have been kept. Céline took forty-one of them.