The portraits in Before and After were made at a Buddhist Meditation retreat center in Dharamsala, India. We worked with a group of participants in the annual, 3 month meditation retreat. The Vajrasattva is a Tantric meditation practice in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, which involves visualization, mantra recitation, and purging of various mental negativities in order to purify the mind. The retreat is an intense experience that involves 5 AM wake up, 10 hours of meditation per day, fasting and daily periods of silence. 

Each participant agreed to be photographed the day before the beginning, and the day after the completion of this life transforming experience. Using the tradition of Before and After portraiture, a photographic tradition that often demonstrates the effects of diet or plastic surgery, we wanted to see if the inner transformation - if one believes in such - leaves any tangible trace on the face and in the photograph. How do we approach photographic evidence and is photography sensitive enough to render such changes visible?