The Monastery Keys

The first thing one notices, on entering a Carthusian house, is not the silence but the fact that silence has been built. It has walls. It has corridors. It has a particular acoustic — neither dead nor live, but suspended — which is the result of seven hundred years of architectural attention to a single problem.

I photographed inside eleven houses over six years. I was permitted, in each case, to work alone, before lauds. The light at that hour is a light without intention. It does not seek you out. It does not flatter. It simply, slowly, fills the room.