St. Croix’s images offer an exceptional view inside her cloistered community at the Dauphine Street convent, where the nuns operated a girls’ school and an orphanage between 1824 and 1912. Undaunted by heights and heavy equipment, St. Croix expertly photographed the convent grounds and daily tasks of the nuns, students, and orphans from a variety of viewpoints. Often used as promotional material, her images were reproduced in books and postcards and shown at world’s fairs in 1893 and 1904. St. Croix’s pictures are some of the only photographs of the Ursuline convent at its bucolic Ninth Ward location along the Mississippi River. That site was torn down in 1912 when the Ursulines moved into a new location uptown, which is still in operation today, and St. Croix was there to document the transition.

Cloistered with a Camera includes roughly 90 images by Mother St. Croix displayed alongside the objects used to make and reproduce them—her cameras, glass plate negatives, lantern slides, and printing plates, as well as a photograph album, books, and postcards. Developed with input from the Ursuline Academy and Convent, the show will also feature student work from the newest generation of Ursuline students, honoring the order’s commitment to education. Rarely photographed herself, St. Croix emerges as a symbol of the Ursulines’ legacy, a woman whose vocation took her to artistic heights while remaining grounded in the daily work and devotion of cloistered life.