Photographer's tryst with yoga

Documenting yogis

Known as the golden photographer of the rich and famous, Michael O’Neill considered himself an atheist. But his spiritual journey began when a spinal surgery left him partially paralysed. Unable to shoot photographs, Neill turned to meditation for recovery, and ever since he has been a practitioner of Kundalini and yoga. “After surgery when my arm was paralysed, I used meditation to not become handicapped. I wanted to cope with my injury and be better,” says the 69-year-old.

As a photographer with five decades of experience, he observed how there wasn’t any portfolio on yogis and yoga. “I had photographed presidents, film stars, astronauts, athletes, but I had never seen a portfolio of yogis. That was the impetus for me. The child in me wanted to tell a story,” the New York-based professional tells Metrolife.

Recollecting the series of events that led him to India, he adds, “Sometime in August of 2005, I had finished a yoga class. I came out onto the streets of Manhattan with a yoga mat under my arm and I bumped into my director of photography from Vanity Fair, who I hadn’t seen in a year. We started talking about yoga, and I said I would love to do a portfolio on the masters and gurus of yoga and Susan (White) looked up at me and went, ‘absolutely — and (also) do a book’.”

That gave shape to his photographic tribute — On Yoga: The Architecture of Peace that tells the story of yoga and yogis through nearly 200 photographs. “I didn’t pay much attention to White that time. Later, I wrote a proposal to the magazine and four months later, they supported me to do the first portfolio. So, I started photographing in January 2006,” says O’Neill whose works are displayed at Visa pour l’image (Perpignan, France); at II Mes Internacional da Fotografia (São Paulo, Brazil); and Houk Friedman (New York). From some of the most influential yogis of their time such as B K S Iyengar, K Pattabhi Jois, and Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa to meditation masters like His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama and S N Goenka, O’Neill’s images celebrate both the “rich tradition and the modern global community of yoga”. “All I wanted to do was to pay homage to yoga’s classical lineage and understand this unique moment before it slips away,” says O’Neill.

He soon became drawn towards the age-old practice. “From the point I started working on the idea, I became so enamoured. The older man in me had been a professional photographer and the little boy in me was curious to learn about the people. I was having such a great time that I started to fund my own trips to Mount Kailash and Kumbh Melas,” avers O’Neill.  He adds, “I became fascinated with what yoga can do to help us — calm us down, bring us peace, lessen stress and heal mankind. For me, yoga is a gift to humans and it offers
solutions to coping with the life that we live in.”

Two of O’Neill’s most important subjects — meditation master Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji (president of Parmarth Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh) and Ashtanga guru Eddie Stern (founder of Ashtanga Yoga, New York), have been a part of his book with their essays on the role of yoga in contemporary culture; the history of the practice from the time of Patanjali; and the healing power of what O’Neill calls “the architecture of peace — a series of postures that bring the practitioner closer to touching the infinite”.

Over a span of nine years, he collected 90 thousand images which were edited and brought down to 200 for the book. He says, “Over the years, I worked gathering impressions with notations to what I experienced in the world of yoga. There was no agenda or master plan. It was simply being involved in photography.”