Abstracts
Summary
Denis Lessard introduces his essay by defining what motivated Clara Gutsche to explore the world of cloistered nuns, its characteristic culture of welcoming, and the myths that surround it. Lessard then discusses the camera's incursions into the world of monastic women in Quebec and comments on the composition of Gutsche's images, showing how her visual construction sometimes reveals a certain sense of the foreign. After exploring how the social subtext is expressed in Gutsche's photographs, Lessard concludes with a reflection on the separation between the profane and the sacred in contemporary society.