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The Searchers
Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher
(2006)
The photographs in The Searchers look at various aspects of Western spiritual tourism in India. India has long had a vast, loosely organized industry in Spiritual training made up of Utopian communities, yoga centers, meditation retreats, Gurus both Indian and Western, and a massive circuit of festivals, pilgrimage sites and places of worship. This landscape of spiritual (and social) possibility, along with exotic surroundings and low costs draws large numbers of Western seekers who come for a week or a lifetime.
The Searchers builds on our previous work The Gringo Project (Sasha Bezzubov, 1997-2003) and Expats and Natives(Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher, 2002-2005) by addressing the population of young Western travelers visiting the developing world, their relationship with their host country, and what this means within the larger questions of history, economy, race, and idealism.
The Searchers consists of several distinct series (ranging in genre from portraiture to landscape to abstraction), which compliment and inform one another. Believing that no one stylistic approach could accommodate this multi-layered subject, we formed several responses - from somber to humorous, from visually driven to conceptually structured. Using 4x5 and 5x7 view cameras, we photographed transient seekers and lifetime converts, architecture in the communities they found, and the spiritual practices they engage in.
Things Fall Apart
(2001-2007)
“It is thus that we are warned at each step of our nothingness, man goes to meditate on the ruins of emptiness, he forgets that he himself is a ruin still more unsteady, and that he will fall before these remains do.”
- Chateaubriand
Looking at ruins has a long cultural history, pariticularly in poetry and painting. Traditionally, the contemplation of ruins signified the contemplation of mortality – both of the society and of the self. Starting in the 17th century, the Grand Tourists visited the ruins of former civilizations to be reminded that even the mightiest of empires would eventually become “time’s shipwreck”. If the seemingly indestructible stone buildings of ancient Rome succumbed to armies, natural disasters and decay, why wouldn’t they? Witnessing the destruction of cities and the wreckage of our built enviornments, we too are reminded that we, and everything we’ve created, are transitory and impermanent.
As the name indicates, a natural disaster is a normal occurrence, a standard way that the earth regulates itself. However, because of our unprecedented impact on the environment, these events have become catastrophically severe, frequent and deadly. As the systems that cause the earth to warm continue to affect each other, the feedback loops they create may render the decline irreversible. The presence of the ruins left in the wake of these disasters may become less of an exception than the rule.
Things Fall Apart is a series of photographs of destruction caused by natural disasters in India, the US, Indonesia and Thailand. Using the genre of landscape photography, a tradition born with and used to celebrate industrial expansion, these photographs evidence the fragility of the man-made as it is transformed into dreamscapes of apocalyptic proportions. I derive a guilty pleasure from witnessing and representing ruins. Images of destruction are beautiful because there is pleasure in knowing a kind of truth, the truth of fragility and impermanence. But there is suffering buried in these images, the suffering of others, and by extension, of ourselves.
Expats and Natives
(2002-2005)
Sasha Bezzubov and Jessica Sucher
The portraits in Expats and Natives were made in small-scale tourist destinations of the developing world -- islands in Thailand, surfing villages in Nicaragua, coastal towns in Mexico. We traveled to these destinations in search of natural beauty, indigenous culture and respite from the urban pace – irresistible notions inherited from centuries of storytelling, photographs and advertising.
In these areas, where there is seemingly little interaction between tourists and locals, we noticed a significant population of mixed families— travelers who stayed and became expats, living with their local wives (or less frequently, husbands) and raising a family in a new culture. We found westerners who had come for similar reasons as us, drawn by the exotic or the escape but who had chosen to remain, and locals who had found a different future outside of their culture. These families came together as a consequence of tourism, a new manifestation of the complicated mixing of cultures that began along trade routes and continues through flows of capital and travel.
In some situations, these families seemed to echo the historical power dynamics between genders as well as between citizens of the developed and developing worlds – age differences, obvious gaps in background and economic levels, tensions and disillusionments. In other cases, the equity and tenderness of the family seemed to undermine easy judgments about status and power. Most frequently, the children in these pictures grounded the families in their shared futures.
As the largest industry in the world, it is often through tourism that the cultures of the developed and the developing worlds meet. These families suggest the layered history and unknown futures of these relationships formed in the intersection of two worlds.
The Gringo Project
(1997-2003)
Between 1997 and 2003 I traveled to many developing countries in Central and South America, North Africa and Asia to make portraits of Western travelers. I was looking for both an escape from the West and a search for its alternative. However, whether I was in the remote Himalayas or the jungles of the Amazon, I found that the West was everywhere: in fast food restaurants, name brand products, movies, and the Western travelers themselves. Where are these people from? What brings them there? How is the place and the traveler altered by this exchange? Seeing how ubiquitous traveling has become, I decided it was a phenomenon worth addressing.
These portraits are set in places that are perceived to be unchanged by the modern age. The search for an untainted past is one of the reasons we travel there. We are, however, another link in a long chain of explorers, merchants, missionaries, and conquerors that have left an impact on these cultures. This conflicts with the noble aspirations that guide the traveler - the desire to learn through encounters with the unexpected. How does travel - an act of freedom - relate to the history of colonialism, of which it is a by-product?
All the photographs in this series are full-length portraits. There is both tension and ease in the way the traveler and the setting coexist. This work addresses the paradox of traveling as being both personally sublime and culturally profane. These portraits act as signposts; all the ideas are reduced to a simple record of people in a place where they don’t belong. I believe this work is significant not only because it is a record of travelers all over the world, but it also reverses the old discourse on us and them. It presents a neglected aspect of our culture in its contact with the mythical opposites of the Other.
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