In Umbra Lucis gathers work Roland Reinstadler made inside Lanegg Monastery in Lana, South Tyrol, a cloistered house of the Teutonic Order. Introduced by the Prior, and working with the provincial superior, he photographed the architecture, the friars and nuns, and the ordinary texture of their days, along with the moments between observances and the surrounding setting. The Latin title can be understood editorially as suggesting something like “in the shadow of light”: light arrives here as a problem rather than a comfort, and the cloister is pictured as a place where illumination and obscurity keep changing places. The subject is therefore not monasticism as spectacle but the daily negotiation between faith and its surroundings.
GOST Books issues the project in August 2026 as a clothbound hardback of 112 pages, printed in four colours at 190 by 263 millimetres. The trim is modest but not small, wide enough to let architectural photographs hold their composure and tall enough to keep a figure or a corridor intact. The colour printing matters in a book organised around shadow: the tones Reinstadler finds in stone, cloth, and half-lit interiors need gradation to register, and a sequence developing quietly across the pages depends on that consistency.
The book is personal as well as documentary. Reinstadler has described it as a work about faith and the divine and about the lives of the friars and nuns, and at the same time an attempt to shed light, through metaphorical images, on the more complex side of the Church, and perhaps an attempt to come to terms with his own past. That double address distinguishes the project from straightforward institutional reportage. The photographs are asked to serve both an outside subject and an inward argument.
For a collector, the appeal lies in the access and its handling. Permission to photograph within a cloistered monastery is uncommon, and Reinstadler evidently did not spend it on the picturesque. The book’s interest comes from the correspondence between contemplative life and a photographic method built on withheld light, and from the question of how a photographer turns a difficult institution and a personal history into a sequence that holds. Published in English.
