Blue Cliff Record Photographs

The Blue Cliff Record Photographs pairs one hundred koans with one hundred photographs. The Blue Cliff Record is a classic Chan collection of a hundred cases—encounters that cannot be settled by explanation. This work answers each case with an image rather than a commentary. It is made in collaboration with Kogen Jamie Howell, a lay Zen teacher, and with San Francisco Zen Center. Teacher and camera meet the same material: a pointed situation, a world already complete, nothing extra to add. The photographs do not illustrate the koans. They stand beside them, one hundred to one hundred, as another way of facing what the record places before us.