“Photo by a Sister”: Materiality and Gender in the Camera Work of an Ursuline Nun

This paper explores the work of Ursuline nun and photographer Mother St. Croix produced between 1888 and 1924. St. Croix is one of the earliest known female photographers to capture daily life in New Orleans. Analyzing her images and the objects she used to make them, I position St. Croix as a skillful photographer who documented her cloistered community during a time of change. St. Croix used her camera to push the Ursulines into the public sphere, and in doing so, continued a history of Ursulines challenging gender prescriptions in New Orleans.

Born in France, St. Croix joined the Ursuline order in 1873 and arrived in New Orleans that year. She lived in the convent—first on Dauphine Street downriver and then Uptown on State Street—until her death in 1940. St. Croix’s photographs provide an exceptional view inside her cloistered community at the Dauphine Street convent, where the Ursulines operated a girls’ school and orphanage between 1824 and 1912. Often used as promotional material, the images were reproduced in books and postcards and shown at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Her images expertly depict the architecture, interior spaces, and daily tasks of the nuns, students, and orphans from a variety of viewpoints. She also documented the construction of a new convent and school on State Street, to which the Ursulines relocated in 1912.

The Historic New Orleans Collection has St. Croix’s photographs in a range of media and the means she used to create them, including her camera, glass plate negatives, lantern slides, and an album of prints. Through these tangible objects, St. Croix’s physical process, technical skill, and artistic eye are revealed. The world she unveils through her camera work, while contained, expands our understanding of convent life in turn-of-the-20^th-century New Orleans.