Photographer exhibits portraits of cloistered nuns

Lili Almog had just finished a major series of photographs.

For Bed Sequence, she had photographed women in their bedrooms. The project was perfectly suited to her interest in intimate portraits of women.

"After the bedroom project, people asked me, 'How can you get much more intimate than that?'" Almog says. "Nuns seemed to be a good answer."

It might have been perfect.

Perfect Intimacy is a series of images shot in three Carmelite monasteries over two years. The photographs are on display at The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky. Almog will speak Friday at the UK Student Center's Worsham Theatre as part of the Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series.

Almog, 48, a native of Israel, first encountered photography through a friend when she was 20. The friend was taking a course, but she often put the camera into Almog's hands because she wanted to be in the pictures.

"It was a very accessible tool, compared to drawing or painting," Almog says. "It was a natural way for me to express myself, and I really liked the process of shooting and then going into the darkroom to see what I got."

Almog became a photography student herself, starting in Tel Aviv in a program that brought her to New York, where she eventually worked as a photojournalist for an Israeli publication.

There, she concentrated on fashion, portraiture and nightlife.

But it wasn't until she went the New York School of Visual Arts that she focused on her own work.

Although the documentary nature of her projects is similar to photojournalism, Almog says, "these are things that I choose to work on, and I challenge myself to get the best out of it."

Photographing nuns was a big challenge.

Cloisters are notoriously closed, secretive societies, so finding one that would let her come in with a camera was difficult. She eventually found her opening at a Carmelite order in Haifa, Israel, which led to Carmelite monasteries in Bethlehem and in Port Tobacco, Md.

"As a Jewish woman, I had no idea about Christianity and monasteries and things like that," Almog said. "I didn't even know they were marrying Christ."

The images she produced are often of spare, modest spaces with women frequently in prayer.

"It was really beneficial knowing nothing," Almog said. "I learned as I went with it. It was very natural."

In this new world, Almog observed similarities to other religious cultures and the women within them.

"The way the women cover themselves is very similar to Orthodox Jews and even Muslim women," Almog says. "It is a different style but very much the same idea of covering yourself."

She also noted similarities in the rituals of prayer at specific times of day.

In addition to her photographs, Almog has incorporated video into her work. One such piece is a 20-minute accompaniment to Bed Sequence. Her latest project, The Other Half of the Sky, has taken Almog to China, where she explores the lives of women in a variety of Chinese cultures.

Photographing the intimate lives of women comes naturally to Almog because she comes from a family with a dominant mother and grandmother.

"That made me comfortable being in intimate circumstances with women," she says.

This story was originally published January 24, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Photographer exhibits portraits of cloistered nuns."