Galerie Françoise Livinec is dedicating an exhibition to the photographic work of Matthieu Ricard to mark the release of his book Lumière, published by Éditions Allary. Sixty photographs, including previously unpublished shots, will retrace more than half a century of meditative life. Matthieu Ricard writes:
For sixty years, my photographic journey has been a quest for light. The images: impose themselves, the evidence of a moment where the place, the beings and the light are in harmony. For me, photography is a tribute to the beauty of beings and the world, a way to share wonder and restore confidence in our common humanity, by recalling our intimate connection with nature and sentient beings.
As a child, already fascinated by light, I amused myself by capturing its reflections. My first camera, received at the age of twelve, gave me a taste for searching for shadows and contrasts. At fifteen, thanks to André Fatras, I discovered animal photography and nature became my field of exploration. Soon, some of my images were published. Then came my travels to the Himalayas, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and my twenty-one visits to Tibet. Photography there became an exercise in attention and patience: with a few Kodachrome films a year, each shutter release had to be justified. The arrival of digital, in 2000, was a liberation: I could finally experiment freely to better capture these unique moments.
To photograph is to welcome light in all its metamorphoses. It reveals itself in a smile, in the reflection of a summit, in the silhouette of a rider lost in the immensity. The high altitudes, where colors become denser, were privileged places for me. The immense source of inspiration offered by my spiritual masters, the grandiose landscapes, inhabited for centuries by spiritual fervor, offered me the most precious and intense moments of my life. But I also like to capture tiny details: the bark of a tree, fractal plays of moss or sand, infinite reflections of the infinitely large in the infinitely small. This research is in line with my meditative practice: contemplating a flower or a mountain is always opening the mind to infinity.
Photography here connects with Buddhism, which conceives the ultimate nature of the mind as the union of the luminosity of knowledge and the emptiness of self-existence. The texts speak of the “three bodies” of Awakening: the dharmakaya, absolute purity; the sambhogakaya, light unfolding in five colors, five wisdoms; and the nirmanakaya, active compassion. The colors of the spectrum, like the five families of Buddhas, are expressions of this fundamental luminosity. Thus, every burst of light in the world is also a reminder of our deepest nature. The portraits, for their part, are a quest for inner light. I focused on the faces of the people I shared my daily life with, in Tibet or Bhutan, and, even more so, those of my spiritual masters. With them, each photo requires respect and discretion, because it is sometimes more accurate to simply remain in the presence of their wisdom. But the desire to bear witness to these unique moments pushed me to capture these gazes. A successful portrait reveals not only an appearance, but also that secret radiance that resides deep within each of us.
Photography, like meditation, reminds us of impermanence: everything passes, everything is transformed. Photographing is an attempt to distill the essence of a moment destined to disappear. It’s not about freezing time, but about offering a luminous trace. Through these images, I try to convey not only visions of landscapes or faces, but an experience: that of a communion with light, the light that flows through us and the light toward which we are moving. As my mother said at the end of her life: “We do not return to dust, we return to light.”
Matthieu Ricard
The artist will donate the profits from the sales of his photographs to his humanitarian association Karuna-Shechen.
Exhibition
From October 10 to November 15, 2025
Opening on October 9 starting at 6 p.m.
Galerie Françoise Livinec
24, rue de Penthièvre – Paris 8th
www.francoiselivinec.com
Book
Allary Éditions
www.allary-editions.fr
