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Tibetan
Photo Project Documents Monastery Life
by Anne Christensen
photos by the monks of Drepung unless otherwise noted.
You’ve seen reverent photos of Buddhist monks poring
meditatively over a mandala. So had photographer Joe Mickey
– in fact, he’d taken a few – but that
didn’t prepare him for striking up a personal correspondence
with a Tibetan monk in exile.
 And
it certainly didn’t portend his full-time ‘job’
exhibiting the monks’ own photographs of life at the
Drepung monastery in India. Yet that’s where Mickey
finds himself – traveling around the U.S. to expose
a first-person view of a culture he’s never visited.
In October, Mickey showed the photos at Colorado College
to crowds interested in the human side of political exile.
Mickey, a self-proclaimed “skeptical agnostic”
and 30-year photojournalist, sent a disposable camera to
monk Jam Yang Norbu. When he developed the returned film,
he immediately realized the uniqueness of the insider’s
photographic perspective. “Every Westerner’s
photo of Tibet or the Buddhist monks that I had seen is
reverent, but I knew it couldn’t be that pretty all
the time. I was looking for an honest view of how they live,
without our preconceived notions,” he says.
Helping the monks document and preserve their own traditions
is the most important goal of the Tibetan Photo Project,
which includes a Web site and exhibits like the one at CC.
“Tibetans are fiercely independent in holding onto
their culture,” says Mickey, despite China’s
destruction of most of the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries
that formed that culture’s only indigenous educational
system. The Dalai Lama has set up 15 smaller monasteries-in-exile
in India (including Drepung, with about 2,500 men and boys),
as well as several nunneries, to preserve Tibetan religion
and education.
Mickey says he doesn’t think modern photography changes
the monks’ traditions or perspectives. “Their
culture is so ingrained in them, but it’s fluid. They’re
following traditions that are 2,000 years old, but they’re
not isolated — they tour the West, visit villages
in India, and are exposed to radio and TV. They have more
extensive exposure to the West than my shipments of cameras,
and it doesn’t change their lives.”
But it has changed his own life. “For me, it validates
that it’s okay to not think that money is the most
important part of life,” he says. “The project
has adopted me, for better or worse.”
See more photos at http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com
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