Photography
by George Haas
Exploration in Full View
“The ordinariness of our lives is oftentimes rendered invisible. Where do we find meaning in the things we do have access to? In the ordinariness of finding meaning in life. This is what my photography explores.”
—George Haas, Founding Teacher of Mettagroup, Author and Photographer
What is Exploration?
Exploration is the pursuit of anything you find authentically meaningful. While it can be a career or work-related, it doesn’t necessarily need to be monetized in order to be considered exploration. Exploration can include (but is not limited to) making art, writing, creative endeavors, playing pickle ball, having a family, practicing yoga or meditation, traveling and more.
George’s own form of exploration lies in the art of photography.
What do you feel called to explore?
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George’s Journey
From New York to Los Angeles
George moved to Los Angeles from New York to work in film and photography in 1992, when he started practicing Vipassana at Ordinary Dharma in Venice, and studying Buddhist texts extensively.
From Meditation Student to Teacher
In 1998 he began study with Shinzen Young, at Vipassana Support International, who encouraged him as he did with all his senior students to begin teaching.
He began teaching meditation in 2000, founded Mettagroup in 2003, and became an empowered teacher through Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, where he taught from 2007 to 2016.
In 2017, he met Dan Brown, who became his meditation teacher and also mentored him in integrating the Ideal Parent Figure Protocol into his Meditation x Attachment program.
Along with his full schedule of one-on-one students, he continues to teach weekly classes and intensives in Los Angeles and online, and offer day-long, weekend and extended retreats around the world.
Artist
George Haas is an artist with works in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, the Library of Congress, MoMA and the American Irish Historical Society. George Haas studied film, photography, and sculpture at Columbia College and The Art Institute of Chicago before moving to New York.
His photographs have appeared in numerous exhibitions, including The School of Art Institute of Chicago, The Bergman Gallery, The Soho Photo Gallery, Club 57, The Couturier Gallery, The Finley Gallery, and the MoMA.
His photographic and written work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The LA Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Seventeen, Detour, NME, and Spy Magazine. His stage work has been performed in New York, Boston and Chicago, including No Entiendes and Doris and Inez Speak the Truth.
He wrote and directed the feature film Friends and Lovers, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Stephen Baldwin and Claudia Schiffer, distributed by Lion's Gate Films. His independent films from his New York days have been collected by MoMA. Photographs from this series have been added to the permanent collection of American Photographers at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C and to The Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.
“The neuroscience is catching up. They’re talking about how we make representations of things, that are both part of what’s there because that’s the stimulus. But then we assign all the meaning to what’s there. And so, we create these experiences not so much based on what’s actually happening, but based on ‘what is happening’ means to us.
Therein rests the theme of my photography. For decades, I’ve explored how the subtle distortion , the meaning we assign and the balance that we give, distorts the perception of what’s there.
Let’s consider my book Forcing Nature. If you look at those pictures, they’re all off somehow. They're all distorted in some way. So then the question is: what is that?
It’s the way we make everything up.
We live in a world of our meaning, not in a world of what’s happening. How do we detect that? And if we miss an assign meaning, we can remake the world. That’s liberation. To be free to make the world and to see that the world that you made is more in line with what ultimate reality is.”
— George Haas
What People Are Saying
“Rooted in his own remarkable gender-questioning photographic work and frank personal history, George Haas’s book is a monument to an unrivaled period of artistic experimentation and identity politics in New York that has continued to inspire change and fuel the cutting-edge culture of cool into the 21st Century.”
— Ron Magliozzi and Sophie Cavoulacos, Museum of Modern Art, New York, organizers of Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village 1978-1983
“In the 1970s–as in times before and since–young misfits fled to NYC from farm and suburban towns in search of community and self-actualization. Amidst crumbling infrastructure and urban ruin, young artists of all stripes engineered a new culture, saturated in shimmering queerness and a rise-from-the-trash-heap sensibility. George Haas offers us a brilliant slice of that place and time, evoking memories of fluorescent vinyl muted with soot, pre-dawn stubble poking through pancake makeup, and dance floor smells of youthful exertion and fresh hair dye.”
— Tom Hill, activist and artist
“George Haas has a smart, sophisticated, felicitous observational eye—but more than that, he has deep compassion for who we all were when we were very young. To outward appearances, a sumptuous art book full to the bursting: large- format photographs and texts pertaining to a certain era. (As Leonard Cohen once put it, “those were the reasons/and that was New York.”)
And all that it is, gorgeously. But spend more time with The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect and a different picture emerges, a lost world, lost souls, lost lives, found again through Haas’ images, words, heart. The book is filled with poignance and melancholy, achingly so. Yet when you put it back in the slipcase what you are left with is resilience—and even, on a good day, a sense of triumph.”
— Howard A. Rodman. novelist (The Great Eastern; Destiny Express) and screenwriter (Savage Grace; Joe Gould’s Secret)
Lena Dunham, writer and creator of the HBO television series Girls
“George Haas will take you back to a New York that feels both impossibly glamorous and unthinkably tragic, with the precision of a scalpel and the tenderness of Proust. This is a book for anyone who has loved and lost, and for everyone who wants to better understand the ties that bind us to the places we dream of returning to but are no longer there. George is a writer of uncommon grace.”
Excerpts from Punch Outs
Excerpts from
The Lower Manhattan Dormitory Effect
Excerpts from Forcing Nature
Custom Prints
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