The White Handkerchief
-
Dates2023 - Ongoing
-
Author
- Location Fairfield, United States
The White Handkerchief is an ongoing personal photography project studying the complexities that lie in the wake of the 1970s-era Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement in rural Fairfield, Iowa.
The White Handkerchief is an ongoing personal photography project centered around a 1970s-era Transcendental Meditation (TM) community in Fairfield, Iowa. Transcendental Meditation, introduced to the US in the 1950s by guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, is a mantra-based meditation technique aimed at deep relaxation and heightened awareness. When Maharishi established Fairfield as TM's American headquarters in the 1970s, thousands of his devotees flooded the rural Iowa town to live near his growing spiritual center. Today, despite Maharishi's passing in 2008, the utopian TM community persists, complete with Maharishi’s university, golden meditation domes, a Vedic city, and a community of thousands of meditators.
As the child of first-generation immigrants, I often feel drawn and connected to individuals who yearn for something intangible –– whether it be a homeland, spiritual fulfillment, or an alternative way of being. Beginning in May of 2023, I started documenting Fairfield –– compelled to understand how this community sustains its transcendent visions despite the financial and cult-adjacent controversies surrounding the TM movement and Maharishi's legacy.
On the surface, the photographs in the series paint a portrait of belief and searching –– a community seeking, not some tangible Promised Land, but abstract promises of personal bliss and universal harmony. Underneath lie unanswered questions, disillusionments, and complicated legacies. The title, The White Handkerchief, references the handkerchief disciples offer during the TM initiation ceremony –– symbolic of the supposed “purity” within the movement. Yet, for the series, it floats as a silent question –– could there be subtle violence in even the most utopian visions? Rather than binary narratives of good or bad, the photographs lay bare the perpetual interplay of yearning and questioning etched into this community. In doing so, the spaces between shadows begin to reveal far more nuanced and universal truths about human nature and our susceptibility to promises of individual and collective salvation.
