AUTHOR AFTERWORD
INFINITE LIGHT: A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEDITATION ON TIBET
This book is my love letter to Tibet.
It is the reflection of my inner and outer journeys to this land and a very personal impressionistic view of what it feels like to be in Tibet. It is also a social and political statement and another cry for awareness about what is being irrevocably lost.
I had always wanted to go to Tibet and finally ventured there in May of 2007. Like many others, I was familiar with images of Tibet and the vibrant palette of colors and vast clarity of details that are evident due to the region’s dryness and high altitude.
Up until that point, most of my personal photography was in black and white, but in Tibet I chose to photograph with the last of the Kodachrome film. I knew that the deep reds of the monasteries, and monks’ and nuns’ robes, would sing with this medium, but that the subtle colors of the stones and landscape would be tonally quiet. And, this film rendered the truest photographic black. It is this contradiction and duality that I continually search for and respond to visually, as I believe that they are the seen metaphors for all that exists.
Before I left on my journey, I had what I can only describe as a vision, which was to create a linear visual sentence of images that would unfold in a color sequence akin to the colors of Tibetan prayer flags. Nothing like this had ever occurred for me; typically I am reactive to my environment as a starting place for my work.
After that first trip, which garnered half of the images for my project, I was almost homesick with longing to return to Tibet. I was scheduled to go in May of 2008, but after the uprising in March of that year, Tibet was off-limits to tourists and I had to postpone my trip. I finally made it back in September of 2010 and completed the photography for what I consider to be this photographic meditation.
For the first five months of 2011, I spent countless mornings sequencing the images. Working in a meditative state for an hour or two at a time, I placed the photographs in pairs on tall boards and walked around them over and over again in order to feel how they unfolded visually. When I stumbled on a gap in the sequence, I re-edited all of the film from both trips, searching for an image to bridge the flow of the photographs. This book encompasses that completed sequence.