Beholding Paradise: The Photographs of Thomas Merton

Beholding Paradise: The Photographs of Thomas Merton provides the reader with the only available overview of Thomas Merton’s photographs while also providing a highly accessible introduction to Merton as a photographer. For Merton, his photography, as his writing, became a way for him to explore and express his relationship with the world. As he discovered contemplative photography, and how to use a camera as a contemplative instrument, he produced images that had the same effect as much of prose and poetry writings in the last decade of his life. Media and advertisers used images manipulatively to sell a story or an object. By contrast, Merton’s images have nothing to sell, they cause us to pause, to stop, to see, to see what is right in front of us every day. This volume allows the reader to explore, meditatively, the way that Thomas Merton came to see the world in the final decade of his life.