Jamie Williams: Tibet

Photo © Jamie Williams-All Rights Reserved
Here's some really terrific imagery of Tibet by photographer Jamie Williams, who's based in Sydney, Australia.

His biography is unfortunately sparse, and apart from dividing his time between photographing editorial and commercial imagery, and pursuing his own personal projects, we know that he won quite a impressive awards to include Honorable Mentions in Prix De La Photographie (Paris), and that he worked with many publications to include Australian Airlines Magazine, In Style, World Expeditions, etc.

There are quite a few of photographs in Jamie's Tibet gallery that I ought to mention; the juxtaposition of the prayer scrolls and the Mani stones images, the Tibetan woman with the prayer wheel in silhouette (above), the woman cradling a baby near a pile of Mani stones, and the woman walking underneath prayer flags in a village...just to mention a few. The gallery consists of 47 images, so you'll need a few minutes to enjoy them. And the photographs are big...really big! The size that photo editors want and like.

His travel galleries also include imagery from Nepal, India, Kashgar, Kyrgyzstan, his native Australia and Papua New Guinea.

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China's Tibet: Desmond Kavanaugh

China's Tibet from Desmond Kavanagh on Vimeo.

This is hardly a travel feature, but is more of a statement against the encroaching Sinification of Tibet. Desmond Kavanaugh is an a Dublin-based photographer, who produced a documentary made of still images titled China's Tibet.

The collection of photographs is an exploration of the effects of Chinese occupation and development on the ancient culture and land of Tibet as it is pulled into the 21st century by one of the worlds fastest growing economies.

As Desmond writes: "This new Tibet is powered and connected, and is a haven for Han Chinese migrants attracted by Government subsidies. The documentary focuses on the issues of militarization, immigration, construction, propaganda and and repression of culture all set against the backdrop of the stunning plateau."

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Eugene Kuo: Labrang Monastery

Photo © Eugene Kuo-All Rights Reserved
Eugene Kuo is a graphic designer and photographer living in New York. He is interested in documenting changing landscapes, whether physical or psychological. His recent projects have taken him from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian railroad, through the ancient cities and khanates of Uzbekistan, and along the Silk Road in western China. It was on this last trip that he photographed the Labrang Monastery, a pocket of Tibetan Buddhism. The photographs are mostly wide angle and black & white.

Also explore Eugene's other works. He is currently editing two series of photographs based on his time spent in Uzbekistan and in western China.

Labrang Monastery is one of the six great monasteries of the Geluk (Yellow Hat) school of Tibetan Buddhism, which is located in Xiahe County in Gansu province, and strategically intersects four major Asian cultures--Tibetan, Mongolian, Han Chinese, and Chinese Muslim.

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Terri Gold: World Imagery

Photo © Terri Gold -All Rights Reserved

“I believe images that share our stories can have a positive impact on our world.” - Terri Gold

Terri Gold is an award-winning photographer and artist based in New York City, and has built an impressive reputation for her rituals, rites of passage, festivals, celebrations and portraits from all over the world. Her ongoing personal project “Still Points in a Turning World” focuses on Asia’s vanishing tribal heritage, and has been widely exhibited.

In January 2009, she was chosen as the Lightroom Featured Photographer in Photoshop User Magazine. She has won numerous awards and has been published on book covers for Random House, Penguin Putnam and Henry Holt. She is represented by Picture Arts and Archangel Images and has taught at the Cape Cod Photo Workshops and is a member of ASMP and National Association of Photoshop Professionals.

On her assignments, Terri tells us that she wears up to four cameras around her neck; a digital camera, a digital camera converted to infrared, a XPan with cross-processed film (or B&W), and a Mamiya 7. She also uses a Zero image pinhole camera and a Diana. As can be seen from her websites, she's an expert infrared photographer, worked with polaroid transfers, hand-painting and is a lith printer as well. Terri digitally recreates these techniques.

To see more from this highly accomplished and impressive artist-photographer, Terri's commercial work can be found on Terri Gold Imagery and her travel portfolios on Terri Gold World Imagery.

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WSJ: Dalai Lama's Birthday

Photo © Saurabh Das/AP -All Rights Reserved
Another photograph from the must-see WSJ Photo Journal, in which performers wearing traditional ornaments waited to greet the Dalai Lama at a meeting held to celebrate his birthday in New Delhi earlier this week.

The Dalai Lama turned 74, remarking lightheartedly that the prayers being said for him by his followers might help him live at least 100 year. The photograph is by Saurabh Das.

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Niki Taxidis: Nepal & Tibet

Here's the work of Niki Taxidis, an Australian-born freelance photographer who worked in remote areas of Australia in health care and forensic sciences for over 12 years. She spent two years as a crime-scene examiner and photographer and has volunteered in health care, education and photographic projects both overseas and within Australia.

Don't skip the entry page of her website, which opens up with a lovely piece of Tibetan music.

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Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn: Tibetan Smiles

Photo © Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn-All Rights Reserved
Bhanuwat Jittivuthikarn is an emerging visual artist who works in all cross-disciplines, including photography. He graduated from the School of Creative Art (University of Melbourne) with a combined degree in International Politics. Returning to Thailand in 2006, he joined SNF Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation, a grassroots empowerment organization in Asia. He worked on community development projects such as the Post-Tsunami Art Project in Thailand, a visual art training in Sri Lanka, documenting life of Tibetan refugee in India, and fund raising for an art project for young novices in Burma.

Between 5-18 January 2009, Bhanuwat traveled to Saranarth in India, to photograph 45 elderly Tibetan refugees, who were meeting the Dalai Lama for the first time in their life. His photographs of smiling and laughing Tibetans are a tribute to the fortitude of the Tibetan people; many of whom have lived in exile for so long.

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The Big Picture: Tibet's Monlam Festival

Photo ©REUTERS/Reinhard Krause-All Rights Reserved
The Big Picture of the Boston Globe featured photographs of Tibet's Monlam Festival. Tibetans observe this important festival with prayers, ritual dances, traditional foods and giant tapestry-like paintings.

Chinese officials have prohibited the festival in the past, and still discourage participation, but ethnic Tibetans are maintaining their traditional culture as mucg as they can.

The above photograph is of a Buddhist monk walking in front of the Thangka tapestry outside a monastery in Tongren, Qinghai province.

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Ryan Pyle: Gongga Shan

Photographs © Ryan Pyle-All Rights Reserved
Born in Canada, Ryan Pyle obtained a degree in International Politics from the University of Toronto and subsequently fled to China on an exploratory mission. In 2002 he settled in China permanently (currently in Shanghai, China), and began taking freelance assignments in 2004. He then became a regular contributor to the New York Times covering China, Time, Newsweek, Outside Magazine, Sunday Times Magazine, Fortune and Der Spiegel.

Ryan recently produced a photo essay on Gongga Shan or Gongga Mountain, which was included as an Honorable Mention in the awards at the Banff Mountain Culture Awards.

The photo essay was produced during an arduous journey through China's remote Sichuan province; departing from the Chinese town of Kangding, Ryan and his writing partner walked 4 days (at an average altitude of 4000m) to reach the remote Tibetan Gongga Mountain Monastery. It was very much a journey from Han China to Tibetan China at a time when relations between the two have been severely strained.

Here's an excerpt: "I had first learned about Minya Konka, or Gongga Shan, from naturalist Joseph Rock. His work in eastern Tibet, now western Sichuan, was pioneering and when he first laid eyes on Minya Konka he believed he had found the largest mountain in the world. He wasn't far off. Minya Konka stands an impressive 7556m and towers above the rest of the range. It's a sight beyond words. The Minya Konka Tibetan Monastery rests at the base of the mountain. My journey to the monastery began on foot in the town of Laoyulin, just outside of Kangding. From there the four-day, 120-km trek to the monastery had taken its toll, walking at an average altitude of about 4000 m. But this is the way many of the pilgrims make the journey to this remote monastery, and it was important to follow in their footsteps to understand the significance of the temple and its role in the community. Each morning at the monastery one monk prays alone in the main prayer hall. It was a damp and cold morning and there was a lovely light coming in from the single window; my only concern was to do justice to the moment."

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Kenzaburo Fukuhara: Blurb Book

This is an unusual post as I'm publicizing a book that I haven't read nor seen yet. However, I like what photographer Kenzaburo Fukuhara put together in a self-published book.

PAR HASARD is a collection of black & white portraits of peoples who passed by the photographer on his journeys on various Asian roads, starting in Osaka to Shanghai, to Lhasa, Mt Kailash in Tibet, to Kashgar, Dunhuang on the Silk Route and in a Yunnan minority village, as well as on the journey from Laos to Thailand.

Kenzaburo Fukuhara is a freelance photographer residing in Beijing, China. After having lived 5 years in Japan, he arrived in China at 2007. His work on the social and cultural subjects in Japan, are often published in European newspapers such a Le Matin, and La Liberation, and in magazines like ELLE, Médias, BILANZ, Figaro among others.

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Heather Anne Linquist: Tibet

Photograph © Heather Anne Lindquist-All Rights Reserved
Heather Anne Lindquist is a documentary photographer and photojournalist based in Chicago. In 2001, she founded Eyefoto and subsequently established a studio in Tucson, Arizona. She's currently at work on a book project showcasing her work in Tibet and China. Her travels have afforded her the opportunities to photograph people, places and events including underwater photography on Fiji, Mexico and Australia.

Her website has various galleries of her type of work, but what interested me is her travel portfolio which mostly showcases images of Tibet and China.

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Viviane Dalles: India

Photograph © Viviane Dalles-All Rights Reserved
Viviane Dalles is a French photographer, who graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (Arles) in 2002. She subsequently traveled to Africa to work for the Festival of African Photography in Bamako (Mali), then worked for the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation in Paris and with photographers from the Magnum agency, helping to edit and develop their archives.

At the end of 2004, she traveled to India and since then has covered stories in more than ten of its states.

Viviane is currently based in New Delhi. Her clients include LeFigaro Magazine, Le Monde 2, La Tribune, Paris-Match, Internazionale, Le Figaro, Le Monde, The Guardian, among others. She is represented by the REA agency (Paris).

I would highlight her compassionate coverage of the Tibetan communities living in exile in Dharmasala and Mundgod (Karnataka) titled Tibetans In Exile: Suspended Identity.

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Tom Wool: ONE

Photograph © Tom Wool-All Rights Reserved
Tom Wool is a British photographer currently living in NYC. I'd describe his work as "ethnographic photography" since the work he presents on his website ONE is of 160 portraits made during his travels to Bolivia, Irian Jaya, Kenya, Morocco, PNG, Suriname, Tanzania, Tibet and Venezuela.

His biography tells us that he worked in a number of fashion publications in the 1980s, and this background served him extremely well in photographing his subjects. Tom traveled to Tibet to work on a project, and with the sale of his photographs, he raised enough funds to build a school in Tzombuk, where some of his portraits were made.

We've been spoilt by the ever-increasing web's bandwidth, and are now used to much larger images than what Tom Wool's are. Perhaps an updated website is in the planning?

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David Gray: South West China

Photograph © David Gray/Reuters-All Rights Reserved
David Gray is a photographer with Reuters, and has published his audio slideshow of South West China on its blog. These are photographs of rarely frequented regions of China.

I'm not a fan of the Ken Burns effect, and although I found it somewhat overused in this slideshow...it doesn't take anything away from the quality of the photography.

David Gray's South West China

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Jean-Claude Louis: Tibet

Photograph © Jean-Claude Louis
I've come across Jean-Claude Louis' work through the many photographic contests he won in 2007 and 2008. For instance, he participated and won (in specific categories) awards in National Geographic International competition, the Travel Photographer of the Year competition (two categories), and the B&W Magazine Portfolio Competition. I also recently saw his work published in Outdoor Photography. For those interested in winning photography contests, his images will certainly offer you clues as to what makes them click with judges.

His biography tells us that he's a physician and a scientist, working in biomedical research until 2007 when he pursued photography full time, specializing in documentary photography. Self taught, he is influenced by Steve McCurry, and this can be seen from his Tibet gallery in particular.

Jean-Claude Louis

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Remi Benali: The Khampa Horsemen

Photograph © Remi Benali-All Rights Reserved
Here's a presentation of photographs by Remi Benali, a photojournalist and travel photographer from France, on The Khampa Horsemen of Tibet.

The Khampas are the inhabitants of the Kham region,the eastern third of Tibet. Marco Polo described the Kham as "thieves and caravan raiders practicing all sorts of magic". Many of them adhere to their religious and cultural traditions. The Khampas' spectacular Yagi Summer Festival is held in Litang, in China's western Sichuan province, one county over from Tibet proper. Tibetans make up 90 percent of the people who live in Litang. The NPR website has further background (including some audio) on the Khampa Horsemen and the festival.

Remi Benali worked with the photo agency Gamma for twelve years and has been working independently since 2002 and currently lives in Provence. His journeys have led him to 70 countries--from the North Pole to the Sahara Desert and the remote jungles of Sumatra to Indian rituals in the Andes mountains. Specialized in travel photography, his personal work celebrates the living remnants of a vanishing past, with a focus on rituals and traditions, tribal cultures and UNESCO World Heritage sites.

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Christopher Wise: Shangri-La

Photograph © Christopher Wise-All Rights Reserved
Five years ago Christopher Wise needed a change from his job as graphic designer in New York, closed his design studio, and moved to Bangkok.

As well as shooting editorial assignments for travel magazines, Christopher has also been pursuing personal stories on the effects of tourism on locations where tourists and locals coexist on an ongoing basis. His images have appeared in Esquire, GQ, Travel+Leisure, Conde Nast Traveller, Gourmet, Departures and Men's Vogue.

Im view of the current events in Tibet, I chose chose Christopher's photo essay titled Shangri-La which includes images from Tibet, Zhongdian, and Litang in China. However, have a look at the rest of Christopher's galleries which include Angkor Wat and Pattaya. The essay on Angkor Wat in particular delves into "the corrosive effect of tourists on local communities, for the evidence demonstrates that "destinations" in the developing world reap little from tourism."

Christopher Wise's Shangri La

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Nick Cobbing: Tibet

Image © Nick Cobbing-All Rights Reserved
Nick Cobbing is a photojournalist based in the UK, whose work focuses on the landscape, people’s relationship to it and to each other. His continuing association with Greenpeace International has had him sailing the seas and oceans, as part of a team that has become the keen eye of this global organization.

Cobbing’s work has been exhibited widely over the years. Amongst regular editorial users of his work are Time Magazine, Newsweek, Fortune, Figaro, all the UK press and several European daily Newspapers. He has also worked with many NGOs including WWF Worldwide, Actionaid, Christian Aid and UK Government agencies.

For TTP, I chose Cobbing's work in Tibet. His story "The Tibetans" show how China's policies of sinofication has impacted its culture and way of life. Exploiting Tibet's resources for its industrialization is a strategic and economic priority for China's government, which usually puts down manifestations of Tibetan identity with blunt force. I think that the above photograph speaks volumes as to the commercialization of Lhasa's Potala Square.

I haven't been to Tibet, but over the years I've seen how Tibetan culture and traditions are thriving in Dharamasala...may it continue to do so.

Nick Cobbing's The Tibetans

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Shahidul Alam: Brahmaputra

Layout © Zone Zero-All Rights Reserved
Here's one of my favorites multimedia presentations by Shahidul Alam, one of the most prominent photographers and educator in South Asia. He became the president of the Bangladesh Photographic Society, and founded the Drik Picture Library and "Pathshala" - South Asian Institute of Photography. He is also a director of Chobi Mela, the festival of photography in Asia, and has been awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 2001, for his contribution to photography. He is on the advisory board for the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund and the National Geographic Society.

Brahmaputra may seem outdated now, but it's still a marvelous multimedia project featuring a journey from Mt Kailash to Lhasa, through Assam down to Bangladesh. The photographs are small and the multimedia add-ons are not as impressive by today's standards, however there's no question that Brahmaputra is one of the multimedia projects that led the way.

Via Zone Zero: Brahmaputra

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Vassi Koutsaftis: Mt Kailash

Image Copyright © Vassi Koutsaftis-All Rights Reserved
Greek-born Vassi Koutsaftis has prowled the globe for over 30 years, specializing in travel photography....of the extreme kind, especially in mountainous regions. He also works as a guide for Geographic Expeditions—and has a sideline as an importer of Asian art.

For today's post, I chose Vassi's gallery of photographs made near Mount Kailash. Mt Kailash is a peak in the Gangdisê mountains which is part of the Himalayas in Tibet, the source of some of the longest rivers in Asia—the Indus River, the Sutlej River, a tributary of the Indus River, and the Brahmaputra River—and is considered as a sacred place in four religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Bön faith. In Hindu religion, it is considered to be the abode of Lord Shiva. The mountain lies near Lake Manasarowar and Lake Rakshastal in Tibet.

There have been no recorded attempts to climb Mount Kailash; it is considered off limits to climbers, in deference to Buddhist and Hindu beliefs. It is the most significant peak in the world that has not seen any known climbing attempts.

Here's Vassi's Mt Kailash

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