July 2007 – Tibet (as a guest of Lifeline Express)

It seems surprising to me that it is over seventeen years since I took these pictures of Tibet! No iPhones in those days (the iPhone was first first released the month before) so all these pictures are analogue. I joined a party of professional photographers and remember feeling quite self-conscious regarding my rat-bag collection of various antique analogue cameras as the professionals, men armed with two SLR Canons a piece, snapped with telephotos out of the coach window. In retrospect, I think the original and vivid results herein speak for themselves.

The first two colour pictures of Gandan monastery are perhaps the most successful and were taken with a Leica camera with a voiglander wide angle lens. Laban is the monk in the picture. He is reading the late Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s ‘Introduction to Buddhism’ (founder of the New Kadampa Tradition), which I gave to Laban as a gift so as to both help his already excellent English, and also as a homage to Geshe who had studied at Gandan monastery as a young man. Picture 2 also has echoes of Holman Hunt’s ‘The scapegoat’ that inspired me when fifteen, visiting Manchester Art Gallery.

I also met Raymond Chan of Hong Kong icon the Spanish restaurant Olé fame, a patron of Lifeline Express, on this trip and we remain firm friends. On the Lifeline train there was a sense of camaraderie, of joy and of gratefulness – and some real characters among the mainly nomadic folk. It is a son and his mother that are photographed here. The atmosphere on the operation train (cataracts) was in sharp contrast with what I found at the other monastery I visited which seemed most claustrophobic in comparison. But again, art can transform life through memory – the abbot who appears on the Smugmug archive (link below) makes a fictional appearance in book 2 of my ‘Inner Circle Wu Xing’ series of novels.