My Photo Scholarship 2010 Entry

My Photo Scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 5 photos

The initial lure of Tibet was my eagerness to experience a culture formed by the highest mountains on earth. However, once I arrived, both of these expectations disappeared into the thin air. The commitment of the people to their pilgrimages and devotion to their revered leader amidst the stirring isolation and oppression they experience, are apparent in the quiet forms of the pilgrims and monks who dedicate their lives, not to the mountains that are so demanding to live in, but to a higher level of consciousness that reaches past the peaks to the heavens. This series of photographs present this view of that silent, distant feeling: There was only one shoe on that mountain pass, the pilgrims enter the monasteries one by one, the monks are called from seclusion to group worship, prostrations are done individually at the Jokhang temple amidst fellow devotees and the vastness of the Potala Palace walls dwarf the pilgrims at journey’s end.
The aspiration of my life is to find a way to live rather than to exist. I travel, not to see how I live in the world, but how the world actually lives. It isn’t just about what I want to see, it is about seeing the reality of things as they are. Traveling has taught me what it means to be human; every single person can experience the entire range of human emotion in whatever walk of life he/she lives. I hope to learn how to capture the breadth of our human condition in my photographs and instill that same emotion in the viewer (even as I learn to feel it myself), either through the people of the place or the natural world that awakens the senses. In order for me to feel alive, I travel. But for those people who don’t travel, I hope to rouse their pedestrian emotions into an active relationship with the world they live in.