Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton

Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton. Photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Timken Publishers, 1991

Full leather “Simplified Binding” structure, leather endbands, Hewit goatskin dyed various shades of gray with Hewit aniline dyes, graphite edges. Title stamped in carbon on spine. Bound 2007.

10 x 10 x .5”

The light to dark progression references the spiritual journey, conversion experience and the upward orientation of many of the images in this book of black and white photographs of Kentucky writer and monk Thomas Merton by Kentucky photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The horizontal bars represent the structure of monastic life, and their undulation represents both the motion ubiquitous in Meatyard’s work and the rolling Kentucky landscape. The seven bars reference the title of Merton’s first and best known published work, The Seven Storey Mountain.
Created for the 2007 Voices and Visions: Art Inspired by Kentucky Poetry, Prose and Songwriting exhibition at the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, KY.