The Many Faces of the Buddha

Photography / Publishing

2025

4 x 5.5 in.

Printed in blue and orange.

New York. Spring 2025

Edition of 100+

THE MANY FACES OF THE BUDDHA is a hand-bound photo-book of various moments captured during meditation retreats over the years. This book was inspired by Larry Yang’s lecture, “Multicultural History of Dharma, Mindfulness, Race and Diversity”, during which I learned that for the first 100+ years following the Buddha’s death, he was not depicted in human form. Instead, his first representations were symbolic: a footprint or a lotus flower, the dharma wheel or a stupa, a riderless horse, among other things.

This is where THE MANY FACES OF THE BUDDHA takes its inspiration, finding the Buddha in his many forms. In a fire or a hillside, in a street sign or in the sky: linking all things in the cycle of dependent origination.

The artist book (pictured below) was riso-printed at the SVA RisoLAB.

Images: Angeliea Stark.