I grew up in a conservative Jewish family, situated in a Jewish neighbourhood in suburban Toronto. Throughout my primary schooling career, I was enrolled in a Hebrew school where the religious, linguistic and cultural Jewish values were taught and emphasized. Now, over two and a half decades later, I am a Zen Buddhist teacher in the Soto Zen lineage. Hasidism, a branch of Judaism founded in Eastern Europe in the late 18th century, advocates spirituality and Jewish mysticism. Its adherents typically constitute two types of practitioners: those who have deep familial ties to the community through birth, and those who have made a conscious adulthood decision to further their observance of Judaism (called baal teshuvah- lit. one who has returned’ or ‘one who owns the answers’). The Soto school of Zen Buddhism (a branch of Zen brought to Japan from China in the 13th century) supports the notion that seated meditation in a state of concentration (or zazen) is the most direct method for grasping a state of suchness (tatha in Sanskrit). The vast majority of practitioners in North America arrive at their practice of Zen as a result of a conscious adulthood pursuit, rather than through familial ties. This body of work consists of 9 30”x44” Hasidic portraits facing 9 30”x44” Buddhist portraits for a total of 18 portraits in all (a mystical number in both Jewish and Buddhist traditions). The photographic references for this project can be traced most directly to the many widely disseminated students of the Neue Sachlichkeit school such as Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth. However, the earlier reference to the Bechers, in photographing increasingly obsolete post-war German industrial artefacts, and the still earlier reference to August Sander, in attempting to document every type of Deutsche Folk in pre-war Germany, are intended as visual citations of historical and contemporary pseudo-sociological pursuits through the photographic medium. Presented are a selection from the series.