Through My Lens: Cloister of Abbaye Saint Michel de Cuxa

For the Second Sunday of Lent, we’re hopping across the Channel to France. This photo is of the Cloister of Abbaye Saint Michel de Cuxa, a Benedictine abbey located in the French Pyrenees.

The abbey was built in 878, abandoned during the French Revolution, and restored to a monastic community in 1919. Its cloister dates back to the twelfth century, but many of the columns were removed in the early twentieth century by an American sculptor and are now on display at The Cloisters Museum and Gardens in New York.

I took this photo in November 2000. It was on this jaunt around southern France that I came to realize how much I value the beauty and the silence of monastic cloisters. I’ve been on a mission to photograph them ever since.