SASHA BEZZUBOV AND JESSICA SUCHER: THE SEARCHERS
Until December 23, 2009 at Daniel Cooney Fine Art
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.
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