The Searchers (Part I)

(2006)

in collaboration with Jessica Sucher

The photographs in The Searchers consider 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 (Part I) consist of portraits of Western spiritual seekers and the Ashrams of Hindu Gurus, Buddhist meditation centers and Sikh boarding schools that cater specifically to them. The presence of these spiritual tourists as well as the communities that they form, is complicated by the same tensions and hierarchies that reflect the larger dynamic between the first and third worlds. Although the goals of spiritual practice deal with personal growth and the transcendence of social, racial and economic differences, as a result of geography and it's inherent power dynamics, these utopian spiritual communities cannot escape being a microcosm of the post-colonial condition.