Is enlightenment contagious? Andy Richter - Photographer of Yogis

The challenge is that my medium keeps me on the outside and I want to go inside. And so that was something I had to wrestle with over many years and try to figure out strategies visually or technically, to kind of talk about that deeper experience of yoga.

Welcome to my podcast, Crazy Wisdom, where I interview people about the stress that is inherent in any creative work and how they come to terms with this stress and use it in the creative process. Today I interviewed Andy Richter. Andy started taking pictures of yogis around the world in 2012 and has recently been profiled in the New York Times for his work. This interview is so interesting. Andy has spent time with yogis in caves in India, and the stories he shares are absolutely fascinating. This guy has had an adventurous life. If you like this episode, please find us on itunes or stitcher and hit the subscribe button. Thanks and have a great day.

My name is Andy Victor, and I am a photographer. I live and work in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and do a lot of my projects photographically all over the world. So the scope of my work is pretty broad, But I would say that I'm working in the documentary tradition, but I'm also working with portraiture and trying to explore things in a deeper, more essential way. My interest in yoga, specifically with regards to photography, happened kind of organically. You know, I've been practicing yoga since 2004, and I began in an Iyengar tradition, so studying with an excellent teacher in Gunnison, Colorado, who was a student of Manuso Manos, who is one of BKS Iyengar's senior teachers in the West. And so I was lucky to be introduced to yoga by someone. This is Brenda Fleming, who's my teacher. And so for the first couple of years, I was really engaged in yoga, focused on alignment, focused on, you know, really holding poses for extended periods of time. And, you know, that was my. That was my foundation. And, you know, it was many years later, probably, you know, 12, well, eight years later, that I really decided maybe photography would be a way that I could go a little bit deeper into my understanding of yoga.