Stephen Batchelor’s interest in photography runs in his family: his great-uncle was the sculptor Leonard Craske, who emigrated to the United States at the outset of the First World War and is best known today for his statue "The Man at the Wheel", i.e. the Fisherman’s Memorial, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Leonard Craske also worked as a photographer and after the Second World War became one of the first in the U.S. to experiment with color film as an artform. Unfortunately, his collection of photographs cannot be traced. He died in Boston in 1950.

As a teenager, Batchelor aspired to become a professional photographer. He was offered a place to pursue his photographic studies at a polytechnic college in central London, but failed to attain satisfactory grades on leaving school. Upon becoming interested in Buddhism in India in 1972, he abandoned photography. He resumed the practice only when he went to Songgwangsa Monastery in Korea in 1981. From then until his return to the West in 1985 he took hundreds of color slides in Korea, Japan, China and Tibet. In 1986 he returned to Tibet to write The Tibet Guide (see Publications) and provided many of the photographs for the first edition of the book. Examples of his more recent work are found in Martine Batchelor’s Meditation for Life (see Publications) . The following reflection on the relation between meditation and photography is extracted from his note at the end of the book.

"As practices, both meditation and photography demand commitment, discipline and technical skill. Possession of these qualities does not, however, guarantee that meditation will lead to great wisdom any more than photography will culminate in great art. To go beyond mere expertise in either domain requires a capacity to see the world in a new way. Such seeing originates in a penetrating and insatiable curiosity about things. It entails recovering an innocent, childlike wonder at life while suspending the adult’s conviction that the world is simply the way it appears.

"The pursuit of meditation and photography leads away from fascination with the extraordinary and back to a rediscovery of the ordinary. Just as I once hoped for mystical transcendence through meditation, so I assumed exotic places and unusual objects to be the ideal subjects for photography. Instead I have found that meditative awareness is a heightened understanding and feeling for the concrete, sensuous events of daily existence. Likewise, the practice of photography has taught me just to pay closer attention to what I see around me everyday. Some of the most satisfying pictures I have taken have been of things in the immediate vicinity of where I live and work."

2. Autumn Leaves and Sky (Sharpham, Devon, 1999) p. 30.