Lenses of Modernity: Photography in Tibet and the Himalayas

Riga Shakya

Sir Charles Bell (British, 1870–1945) and Rabden Lepcha (Sikkimese, act. early 20th century); The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on Throne in Norbulingka; Norbulingka, Lhasa; October 14, 1921; lantern slide from negative; 3-3/16 × 3-3/16 in. (8.1 × 8.1 cm); Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; 1998.285.88.2; photograph © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Photograph of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama

Lhasa, U region, central Tibet 1921

Sir Charles Bell (British, 1870–1945) and Rabden Lepcha (Sikkimese, act. early 20th century); The Thirteenth Dalai Lama on Throne in Norbulingka; Norbulingka, Lhasa; October 14, 1921; lantern slide from negative; 3-3/16 × 3-3/16 in. (8.1 × 8.1 cm); Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; 1998.285.88.2; photograph © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Summary

The early twentieth century saw the opening of photography studios in many Himalayan cities. Tibetologist Riga Shakya examines the complexities of early photography in Tibet and the Himalayan regions as a story of British colonialism, Tibetan nation building, and personal self-representation. Photography profoundly changed how Himalayan people saw themselves. A camera enabled agency in Tibetan elite and Nepalese merchant communities and inspired artists like Amdo Jampa to create new ways of artistic expression.

Key Terms

British Empire

The British Empire was the largest empire in world history, ruling almost a quarter of the world’s land area and population at its height in the mid-twentieth century. The British achieved hegemony in India after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and soon came to rule large areas of the Himalayas, including Kashmir and Ladakh. Several small Himalayan kingdoms, including Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, were allowed to maintain semi-independence as buffer-states against Qing-controlled Tibet. The British briefly invaded Tibet in 1903–1904. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the British became a major cultural and military influence on the Ganden Podrang government in Lhasa. India achieved independence in 1947, ending British rule in the Himalayas.

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a political and social movement in communist China from 1966 to 1976. During this time, traditional culture across all of China came under violent attack, and almost all religious institutions were shut down and many were physically destroyed. In minority areas, ethnic differences and indigenous cultural practices, such as use of Tibetan language or dress, were seen as backward and subject to persecution, adding an additional racial dimension. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans fled to India or Nepal, and many Himalayan artworks were destroyed or scattered abroad.

Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lamas are a tulku lineage that has played a central role in Tibetan history for the last five hundred years. In 1577 a Mongol khan gave the Geluk monk Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588) the title “Dalai Lama,” combining the Mongolian word for ocean, dalai (a reference to the depth of his knowledge), and the Tibetan word for guru, lama. Later, two previous incarnations were retroactively identified. The fifth incarnation, Ngawang Gyatso (1617–1682), allied with another Mongol khan to unite most of the Tibetan Plateau, forming the Ganden Podrang government that would govern Tibet until 1959. Since the Communist takeover, the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama has lived in exile at Dharamshala in India. The Dalai Lamas are understood to be emanations of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

incarnation

Hindus and Buddhist believe that all beings die and are reborn in new bodies, or “incarnations.” While reincarnation is recognized across the Buddhist world, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, some important teachers (lamas) are thought to be able to control this process. Their successive incarnations, known as tulkus (emanation bodies), formed incarnation lineages such as Dalai Lamas, Panchen Lamas, Karmapas, and others.

socialist realism

Socialist realism was an artistic movement practiced during the twentieth century in communist countries, especially China and the Soviet Union. Socialist realism idealistically portrays the lives of working people, often as propaganda to inspire the masses for the state’s economic and social campaigns. Most socialist realism derived from the European tradition of oil painting, but some images used traditional Asian visual forms and conventions, including Tibetan thangka painting and Chinese woodblock prints.

Photography is considered one of the most transformative technologies of the twentieth century. At the turn of the century, visual representations of Tibet were relatively rare. This black-and-white photograph depicts the Thirteenth Dalai Lama Tubten Gyatso (1876–1933) sitting on a ceremonial throne atop an ornate, multicolored dais at Norbulingka, his summer palace. The  is the highest-ranking lineage in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and successive reincarnations have served as the spiritual and political leaders of Tibet since the seventeenth century. The Thirteenth Dalai Lama ruled during a period of tremendous change in the greater world and across the Tibetan Plateau. In the face of invasions by both the Qing and British Empires, he traveled across Asia, declared Tibetan independence in 1913, and implemented printing, military, and infrastructural reforms to attempt to modernize Tibet. 

Taken by British colonial officer Sir Charles Bell (1870–1945) and his Sikkimese orderly Rabden Lepcha on the morning of October 14, 1921, during the 1920–1921 British mission to Lhasa, the photograph is possibly the first taken of the Tibetan ruler in Lhasa. Bell, who served as political officer in Bhutan, Sikkim, and Tibet, writes in his diary that the Dalai Lama was particularly attentive to the staging of the photograph, “giving an order here, making a slight change there.” Developments in photographic technology and the Tibetan experience of British colonialism meant that the “Great Thirteenth” was the first Dalai Lama to be photographed. Tubten Gyatso’s embrace of the photographic medium is emblematic of Tibet’s encounter with modernity, and the photograph reveals how the history of photography in Tibet and the Himalayan region is entangled with that of colonialism and nation-building. 

Empire, Nation, and the Photographic Archive

The visual history of modern Tibet is often thought of as the opposition between colonial stereotypes and indigenous visions. Yet the relationship between these impulses was often fraught and blurry. As scholar-soldiers, British colonial photographers were engaged in the production of useful knowledge about the region for the benefit of the empire. Following the British invasion of Tibet in 1904, photographers like Bell also saw their work as dislodging the existing cachet of exotic images that contributed to Orientalist visions of Tibet as Shangri-la. They did so by embedding themselves in the highest echelons of society and building intimate relations with Tibetan aristocrats and  who would provide them unprecedented access to private and public life in Lhasa (fig. 2).

 

Video
Fig. 2.

The Newark Museum, "Newark Museum: The Forbidden Cities of Tibet," YouTube, July 7, 2017, 7:37, https://youtube.com/watch?v=5uSTf8WcVcs&feature=shares

The photographic records of this encounter consist of portraits of the Tibetan elite at work and play, as well as detailed ethnographic photographs of rituals, festivals, and scenes of daily life. Rather than reproducing an unequal relationship of power, these photographs reveal a relationship that depended on intimacy, intermingling, and mutual accommodation. The institutional and informal afterlives of the colonial photographic archive, created in part with the collaboration of indigenous image-makers—such as Rabden Lepcha (fig.3)—would establish visual tropes, such as the portrait, the “Potala shot,” and the ritualized scene, which would come to represent “the historical and political image of Tibet.” Such tropes were reproduced in the ethnographic photography of the Tibetan borderlands by and during the nation-building projects of republican and later Communist China.

 

Black and white photograph of man wearing dark jacket and patterned dhoti standing beside building
Fig. 3.

Sir Charles Bell (British, 1870–1945); Rabden Lepcha in Delhi; ca. 1915; glass negative; 5 3/8 × 3 ½ in. (13.8 cm × 8.8 cm); Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1998.285.603; photograph © Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

Coupled with the flow of trade into Lhasa from India, Western fashions and commodities—including cameras—became popular with progressive members of the Tibetan and Himalayan elite who were sympathetic to modernizing reforms. This would result in a generation of Tibetan photographers, such as the politician and general Dasang Damdul Tsarong (1888–1959), who used the name George, and Demo Rinpoche, the nephew of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. These indigenous photographers were early adopters who began to realize the power of the lens as a tool of self-representation (figs. 4 and 5). 

Shutters and Selves

Historically, the only visual representations of Tibetan religious leaders took the form of  or devotional tapestries and gilt statues that captured idealized images of the subject based on Buddhist aesthetics. The reproducibility of the photographic image meant that Buddhist rulers like the Thirteenth Dalai Lama, the Eighth  in Mongolia (figs. 6 and 7), and the monarchs of  and  would begin to be seen in a new light by audiences at home and abroad. The legitimacy of sovereign Himalayan nations would be confirmed by the photographic record. At the same time, subjects across the Himalayas would be able to visualize their rulers and religious leaders beyond fleeting glances at state and religious ceremonies (fig. 8), arousing feelings of national belonging and devotion in a distinctly modern way. 

Nobleman wearing russet robe, seated on canopied throne behind ornate casket containing vajra and other implements
Fig. 6

BalduugiinMarzanSharab(Mongolian; 1869–1939); Bogd Khan, Eighth Jibzundamba (ca. 1869–1924), and Yeke Dagini Dondugdulma, His Wife (1876–1923); photographically derived paintings; Fine Arts Zanabazar Museum, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; image courtesy Bogd Khaan Palace Museum Facebook page 

Noblewoman wearing pearl-tasseled crown, seated on canopied throne, holding vajra and bell in hands
Fig. 7

BalduugiinMarzanSharab(Mongolian; 1869–1939); Bogd Khan, Eighth Jibzundamba (ca. 1869–1924), and Yeke Dagini Dondugdulma, His Wife (1876–1923); photographically derived paintings; Fine Arts Zanabazar Museum, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia; image after Tsultem 1986, 176

Mixed media artwork composed of photograph of Lama superimposed onto painting featuring deity portraits and landscape
Fig. 8

Unknown photographer and artist; The Ninth Panchen Lama; hanging on a pillar in Lhakhang, Lukhil Monastery, Likir Village, Ladakh, India; painted photograph, framed; dimensions unknown; photograph by R. Linrothe, 2015

While the image-making practices of British colonial missions would popularize photography among the indigenous elite across the Himalayas, it was merchant communities such as the Lhasa Newars and Kashmiri Muslims who would ensure its popularity among the local populace.  and Kashmiri traders had been living in the urban centers of Lhasa and  since the seventeenth century. Following the enthronement of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama in 1940, these transnational communities capitalized on their access to camera equipment and chemicals and opened the first photography studios in urban centers like Lhasa and . Middle-class families began to sit for staged portraits and family photographs in front of scenic backdrops, holding props like bicycles and radios, or dressed in Western clothing to reflect their status as modern subjects. 

Changing notions of selfhood under the influence of the camera lens (fig. 1) were also reflected in the fine arts. Painters like Amdo Jampa (1911–2002), a pivotal figure in the development of modern Tibetan art, were inspired by the ability of the camera to capture the likeness of the subject. While he began his training in thangka painting, Amdo Jampa would go on to study Chinese classical panting, and Western classical and modernist art, as well , through a remarkable career that spanned the best part of the twentieth century. Appointed court painter to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, he worked from photographs and incorporated photorealistic portraiture techniques into traditional Tibetan forms, typified by his murals at the Norbulingka. His mural painting of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s enthronement ceremony marks the first realist depiction of the Dalai Lama’s personage, and its creation is considered “a remarkable event in Tibetan art history” (fig. 9).  Amdo Jampa’s openness to new forms of expression served as an inspiration to a later generation of Tibetan contemporary artists who came to prominence in the post– era and created their own forms of visual culture.

Camera Tibetica

Photography has long been privileged as a historical source due to the tangible and visceral encounter with the past that it offers, a lens more conducive to a subjective reframing of the history than that of text. Yet historical photographs of Tibet often raise more questions than they provide answers, for as Roland Barthes observed, these images only contain traces of things past. Today, galvanized by social media, more photographs of the Tibetan Plateau and the greater Himalayan region circulate than ever before. Thinking about photography in Tibet and the Himalayas as a practice with a distinct history allows us to see the diverse ways in which local visual cultures responded to and were shaped by the encounter with modernity.

Footnotes
1

’Jigs med bsam gru, “Rgyal Ba Sku Phreng Bcu Gsum Pa Thub Bstan Rgya Mtsho’i Chos Srid Mdzad Rnam,” in Gong Sa tA La’i Bla Ma Sku Phreng Rim Byon Gyi Chos Srid Mdzad Rnam (Beijing: Mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2000), 705–835, http://purl.bdrc.io/resource/W25268.

2

See Melvyn C. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1959: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).

3

Charles Bell, Portrait of the Dalai Lama (London: Collins, 1946), 336. 

4

For more on the British invasion of Tibet, see Alex McKay, “The British Invasion of Tibet, 1903–4." In “The Younghusband ‘Mission’ to Tibet,” Inner Asia 14, no. 1 (2014): 5–25.

5

Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936–1947, Exhibition catalog (Chicago: Serindia, 2003).

6

Hugh E. Richardson, Ceremonies of the Lhasa Year (London: Serindia, 1993).

7

Hugh E. Richardson, Ceremonies of the Lhasa Year (London: Serindia, 1993), 24.

8

Yudru Tsomu, “Taming the Khampas: The Republican Construction of Eastern Tibet,” Modern China 39, no. 3 (May) (2013): 319–44; Yuyuan Liu, “Exhibition Review of the Story of Light and Shadow: 20th Century Chinese Photography from Huang Jianpeng’s Collection,” Waxing Moon 1, no. 1 (2021): 131–39; Michael Aris et al., Lamas, Princes, and Brigands: Joseph Rock’s Photographs of the Tibetan Borderlands of China, Exhibition catalog (New York: China Institute in America, 1992).

9

For example, the British political officer John Claude White photographed the 1907 coronation of the first Bhutanese king Ugyen Wangchuck. John Claude White, Sikhim & Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887–1908 (London: E. Arnold, 1909).

10

The most famous of these studios is Das Studio founded by Newari merchant Thakur Das Pradhan, which remains open today in Darjeeling. Unnamed photography studios in Lhasa are mentioned in Clare Harris and Tsering Shakya, Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital 1936–1947, Exhibition catalog (Chicago: Serindia, 2003), 102. For more on the Nepalese and Muslim communities of Tibet, see David G. Atwill, Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). 

11

See Khri gong o rgyan tshe ring, A mdo byams pa dang dge ’dun chos ’phel (Chengdu: Si khron mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2017)..

12

Tsewang Tashi, “Modernism in Tibetan Art: The Creative Journey of Four Artists” (PhD diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2014).

13

This is attested to by prominent contemporary Tibetan artists such as Gonkar Gyatso and Tsewang Tashi. The latter recently gave a talk at Columbia University about the intersecting lives of Amdo Jampa and Gendun Chopel; see Tsewang Tashi, “Early Modern Art in Tibet: Gendun Chophel and Amdo Jampa” (Virtual lecture, Columbia university, New York, November 19, 2020). 

14

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).

Further Reading

Harris, Clare, and Tsering Shakya. 2003. Seeing Lhasa: British Depictions of the Tibetan Capital, 1936­–1947. Exhibition catalog. Chicago: Serindia.

Harris, Clare. 2016. Photography and Tibet. London: Reaktion. 

Tashi, Tsewang. 2014. “Modernism in Tibetan Art: The Creative Journey of Four Artists.” PhD diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

Citation

Riga Shakya, “Photograph of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama: Lenses of Modernity: Photography in Tibet and the Himalayas,” Project Himalayan Art, Rubin Museum of Art, 2023, http://rubinmuseum.org/projecthimalayanart/essays/photograph-of-the-thirteenth-dalai-lama.

British Empire

The British Empire was the largest empire in world history, ruling almost a quarter of the world’s land area and population at its height in the mid-twentieth century. The British achieved hegemony in India after the Battle of Plassey in 1757, and soon came to rule large areas of the Himalayas, including Kashmir and Ladakh. Several small Himalayan kingdoms, including Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim, were allowed to maintain semi-independence as buffer-states against Qing-controlled Tibet. The British briefly invaded Tibet in 1903–1904. After the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, the British became a major cultural and military influence on the Ganden Podrang government in Lhasa. India achieved independence in 1947, ending British rule in the Himalayas.

Cultural Revolution

The Cultural Revolution was a political and social movement in communist China from 1966 to 1976. During this time, traditional culture across all of China came under violent attack, and almost all religious institutions were shut down and many were physically destroyed. In minority areas, ethnic differences and indigenous cultural practices, such as use of Tibetan language or dress, were seen as backward and subject to persecution, adding an additional racial dimension. Hundreds of thousands of Tibetans fled to India or Nepal, and many Himalayan artworks were destroyed or scattered abroad.

Dalai Lama

Language:
Mongolian,Tibetan

The Dalai Lamas are a tulku lineage that has played a central role in Tibetan history for the last five hundred years. In 1577 a Mongol khan gave the Geluk monk Sonam Gyatso (1543–1588) the title “Dalai Lama,” combining the Mongolian word for ocean, dalai (a reference to the depth of his knowledge), and the Tibetan word for guru, lama. Later, two previous incarnations were retroactively identified. The fifth incarnation, Ngawang Gyatso (1617–1682), allied with another Mongol khan to unite most of the Tibetan Plateau, forming the Ganden Podrang government that would govern Tibet until 1959. Since the Communist takeover, the current Fourteenth Dalai Lama has lived in exile at Dharamshala in India. The Dalai Lamas are understood to be emanations of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

incarnation

Alternate terms:
reincarnation, rebirth

Hindus and Buddhist believe that all beings die and are reborn in new bodies, or “incarnations.” While reincarnation is recognized across the Buddhist world, in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, some important teachers (lamas) are thought to be able to control this process. Their successive incarnations, known as tulkus (emanation bodies), formed incarnation lineages such as Dalai Lamas, Panchen Lamas, Karmapas, and others.

socialist realism

Socialist realism was an artistic movement practiced during the twentieth century in communist countries, especially China and the Soviet Union. Socialist realism idealistically portrays the lives of working people, often as propaganda to inspire the masses for the state’s economic and social campaigns. Most socialist realism derived from the European tradition of oil painting, but some images used traditional Asian visual forms and conventions, including Tibetan thangka painting and Chinese woodblock prints.

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