Kirkus Reviews
Perry's black-and-white photographs of the Tibetan people have an instinctive freshness that casually takes in an expression or a mood, and his shots around and about the city of Lhasa are as intimate as a walking tour (the view from a balcony on the Potala is so far beyond magnificent it is comical). His landscape images have a formal, composed quality near overwhelmed by the prodigious sweeps, where the wind hurries over the ground, snapping at prayer flags. The text, on the other hand, is appalling. It swings between the exquisitely meaningless (``a distant land that points to a time of lost innocence'') to a spit-flecked, bilious rant against the Chinese occupation that is endless and over the top, a concussive hatred making no effort to differentiate between the Chinese government and the Chinese people. Perry may rightly view the occupation of Tibet as a murderous travesty, but sneering comments like ``Old Lhasa is quickly becoming a new Chinatown'' do more harm than service to the Tibetan cause. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Book Description
Unique access to an ancient, endangered people strips away myth in a rare photographic portrait
In five years of travel, often incognito, through Chinese-occupied Tibet and its exile communities in Nepal and India, photographer Art Perry found all the mystery, magic, wisdom, and compassion for which this Buddhist culture is fabled. Yet the land enshrined in his moving photographs and evocative, thought-provoking prose is no Shangri la. Behind these faces and landscapes, from scholars and monks to unlettered herdspeople, Tibetans live with the grinding destruction of their culture.
In his journeys through this remote region of the world, Perry outwits the Chinese police with a feisty driver; visits a monastery declared off-limits to Westerners; and roves from the electric excitement of Lhasa's marketplace to the searing light of the high frozen desert. He visits monks who meditate by flickering yak-butter candles; and he captures a young girl's bright eyes, a boy monk's curiosity, nomadic yak herders in their tents, tattered prayer flags, and old men and women blinded by the light. The Tibetans offers armchair travelers, photography buffs, Buddhists, and spiritual seekers of all stripes the pictorial opportunity to enter the lives of a people whose most treasured commodity is the human spirit and whose plight is the last terrible tragedy of the twentieth century.
In five years of travel, often incognito, through Chinese-occupied Tibet and its exile communities in Nepal and India, photographer Art Perry found all the mystery, magic, wisdom, and compassion for which this Buddhist culture is fabled. Yet the land enshrined in his moving photographs and evocative, thought-provoking prose is no Shangri la. Behind these faces and landscapes, from scholars and monks to unlettered herdspeople, Tibetans live with the grinding destruction of their culture.
In his journeys through this remote region of the world, Perry outwits the Chinese police with a feisty driver; visits a monastery declared off-limits to Westerners; and roves from the electric excitement of Lhasa's marketplace to the searing light of the high frozen desert. He visits monks who meditate by flickering yak-butter candles; and he captures a young girl's bright eyes, a boy monk's curiosity, nomadic yak herders in their tents, tattered prayer flags, and old men and women blinded by the light. The Tibetans offers armchair travelers, photography buffs, Buddhists, and spiritual seekers of all stripes the pictorial opportunity to enter the lives of a people whose most treasured commodity is the human spirit and whose plight is the last terrible tragedy of the twentieth century.
About the author
Art Perry, a lecturer in critical studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, has photographed Tibetan communities, both in Tibet and in Ladakh and Nepal, over the last five years. He has had exhibitions of his work on the Maya of Chiapas, the Nubians of southern Egypt, and the Tuaregs of the Sahara. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
