The MET Cloisters: "everything will be taken away"
Black and white photographs from the MET Cloisters, a reflection on what gets moved, and who decide$
When people think about The MET, most picture the flagship building on Fifth Avenue. Crowds, blockbuster exhibitions, the Temple of Dendur, Salvador Dali, and Monet paintings. The MET Cloisters is entirely different. It sits at the northern tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson River from Fort Tryon Park, and most visitors never make it up there, being the most classy option to temporarily leave the Manhattan chaos, in case you're visiting.
I went there in November with my family. The Fall day was sunny and cold, and I had my camera loaded with a Kodak Tri-X simulation. I started with an orange filter for the exterior shots, which gave me that punchy contrast I’ve become addicted to, darkening the sky and making the clouds pop against the stone tower. But once inside, I had to remove it. The filter costs two stops of light, and the interior galleries were too dim.
The museum holds about 5,000 pieces of medieval European art, mostly from the 12th through 15th centuries. Stained glass windows, ivory crosses, silver drinking bowls, tapestries. Some of these objects are over 700 years old.
But here’s the thing that stayed with me: the building itself was brought here by ship. An American sculptor named George Grey Barnard spent years collecting architectural fragments from French monasteries that had been abandoned after the Revolution. He bought stone cloisters, carved capitals, entire doorways, packed them into crates, and shipped them across the Atlantic. In the 1930s, Rockefeller funded a museum to house it all, and they assembled the pieces on this hill in upper Manhattan.
So when you walk through the Cloisters, you’re walking through something that was taken. Relocated. The monks who carved those stones never imagined they’d end up in New York.
“Manhattan connection”
I’m from Brazil. It’s impossible for me to stand in a place like this and not think about what the Portuguese did to my country starting in 1500. They arrived, displaced the indigenous people, and simply got stole all the gold from Minas Gerais. Some of the pieces in this museum date from that exact period. I didn’t see a single Brazilian artifact, because this is a medieval European collection, but the connection was immediate. The same century, the same logic of removal.
In one of the chambers, there’s a mirror with text etched into the glass: “Everything will be taken away.” I took a selfie there, my camera visible in the reflection, the words floating over my face. I didn’t plan it, I just saw it and felt something.
Portuguese takes from Brazil.
New York takes from everywhere.
On the other side, I take a selfie.
Black and white felt right for all of it. The stained glass, the tower, the park, the mirror. Stripping away color made everything feel older, more connected across time. The Tri-X grain added texture that matched the weathered stone.
The outskirts
Outside, Fort Tryon Park was full of families. Mine ran through an archway and I caught them mid-pose, their shadows stretched long across the pavement. An old tree spread its branches over a carpet of fallen leaves. The stone arch leading into the park looked like it could have been standing there for centuries. Back to the orange b&w filter.
The Cloisters is a strange and beautiful place. It’s also a reminder that history is full of things that were moved, taken, reassembled far from where they began. I walked out thinking about Brazil, about France, about what belongs where, and whether that question even has an answer.
Fascinating. I was up at the Cloisters not long ago, oddly, to visit my mother's memories of being a young woman who would go up there to read. It was free then, no entry fee, and they piped in classical music. She's been ill, so I went less to see anything, than to walk through the mist of her memories if I could. I didn't know that about the construction, taken from here and there and reassembled, but it seems to fit, and makes perfect sense why I thought I'd encounter my mother's memories there, even though she's lost them to dementia and lay in a bed in my house miles away. Thanks for sharing these
Fascinating. And love the frolicking duo with long shadows!!!