Image Tibet

Image Tibet, which was hailed by the 1974 Time Life Photography yearbook “as one of the most important photograph books of the Year,” is a collection of 30 silk-screen printed photographs made in northern India of “Tibetans practicing Dharma”.  First shown at New York’s Underground Gallery in 1971, it was published by the Scrimshaw Press of San Francisco in 1974.  Along with a commentary on the photographs by the scholar Karma Sherab Tharchin Ebin, this unique document “shows an aspect of Buddhism that is not always easy to see” (quotes from the Preface by Lama Kunga Rimpoche).

Image Tibet chronicles the survival of the traditional Buddhist way of life in the face of the political and social turmoils of the mid-twentieth century. Isolated from the mainstreams of world history for most of its existence, the Himalayan nation of Tibet found itself engulfed in the growing pains of the Chinese People’s Republic Cultural Revolution, and by 1959 thousands of Tibetans, including the Dalai-Lama had fled their mountain homeland to seek refuge in India. Gathered together in settlements, these people of the Land of Snow (as the Tibetans call themselves) were free again to turn their prayer wheels and chant from their sacred books in accordance with their age old religious traditions. Here, monks, farmers, mothers, craftsmen, cooks, children, painters, musicians, dancers, nuns, thieves, and holy men replanted and cultivated their ancient seeds of wisdom and compassion, the seeds of an invincible teaching which they had so faithfully carried with them.