Photography and Tibet

In this talk Oxford professor Clare Harris introduces her new book Photography and Tibet, the first historical and anthropological survey of the subject. Featuring stunning visual material that has rarely been made public or discussed before, Photography and Tibet offers remarkable new insights into the attempts of foreign and Tibetan photographers to document the region from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

Harris will present some of the extraordinary images and individuals she researched for this book and analyze how they participate in generating potent imaginings of Tibet, ranging from the malignant to the benign.

A book signing of Photography and Tibet will take place after the lecture. Copies are available for purchase in the Museum Shop.

This talk is presented in conjunction with the Museum exhibition Monumental Lhasa.

About the Speaker

Clare Harris is a professor of visual anthropology at the University of Oxford, curator for Asian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, in the United Kingdom. She has published widely on Tibet and the Himalayas with a particular emphasis on art, photography, museums, and the politics of representation. Her award-winning publications include The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet (University of Chicago Press), which received the E. Gene Smith prize from the Association of Asian Studies in 2014. Her latest book, Photography and Tibet (Reaktion Books), is underpinned by many years of research in museums and archives and in Tibetan communities. Harris has also curated exhibitions and directed research projects that focus on Tibet’s visual and material heritage, including the Tibet Album, a website featuring six thousand historic photographs of Tibet. She is currently working on a new study of photography in the Himalayas with a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust.