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Exiled Tibetans gain voice with first photos
Joe Mickey - 16.05.2004 06:02
The first collection of photos by Tibetans living in exile in India is creating a voice through media coverage and two exhibits of the Tibetan Photo Project. Please see how you can help raise awareness. You can start by not buying the “Made in China” label that helps to finance China in Tibet.
Tenzin Wangden Andrugtsang photo
Lobsang Topgayl photo.
All material © The Tibetan Photo Project
The Tibetan Photo Project offers the first photos taken by Tibetan monks living in exile, images of the Dalai Lama, informational texts and rare 1932 pictures of Tibet.
The perspective provided from the modern history of Tibet and China reveals a great deal about the nature of China's future leadership. The lessons have become even more relevant with the rise to power by Hu Jintao, China's former hardline secretary to Tibet.
Visit  http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com
•HELP grow this voice from Tibet in exile. Please consider adding a link to the project or as a signature to all your emails and Web postings.
•We offer slide show & lecture presentations for groups and organizations.
(See National and regional reviews below)
•JUST IN: Antioch University - Santa Barbara will host a Sept. 9 gallery opening of between 30 and 40 prints.
•OPENING IN 2005, at the Meadows Museum of Art in Shreveport, Louisiana…a complete exhibit of 60 prints, art and artifacts and cultural exhibitions.
•FOR EDITORS: We offer a complete and colorful feature on the Tibetan Photo Project. Drop us an email for a disc.
•FOR RADIO PRODUCERS: AN interview on the Tibetan Photo Project Co-founder Joe Mickey with Monique Fuller can be heard at http://www.radio4all.net/proginfo.php?id=8597 where it can be picked up for broadcast, at no charge.
The power of one frame of film
Working from an isolated coastal town of 5000 in northern California, the combined circulation of publications that have told some portion of Tibet’s tragedy through the Tibetan Photo Project is over 20 million.
• Linked by Harvard Asia Center for the Dalai Lama's 2003 visit.•
•Linked by Africa & Asia studies, University of London•
•Linked by the University of Virginia•
•National media reviews on the Tibetan Photo Project
“REWARDING”
-Parade Magazine
Seen by 16 million readers, resulting in 40,000 hits to
http:/tibetanphotoproject.com
“Their work precisely captures with insight and enthusiasm the life of exiled Tibetans.”
-Bobbie Liegh, Art & Antiques Magazine
•Regional Reviews
"Audiences leave seeing China's treatment of Tibet as a microcosm of how the communist country deals with the world." -The Slice, Colorado Springs
"Tibetan Photo Project is a magic view into a world no Westerner has seen. These unique photographs were created by Tibetan Monks themselves and give voice to their story and culture."
-Scribe, UCCS student newspaper
"Insightful...touching." -GO!
For a brief education at the site, http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com, read "Tibet at the Edge of Extinction." & "Save Tibet...Why?"
Please have a look at http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com
******************
The story of The Tibetan Photo Project
The Story of the Tibetan Photo Project Photos by Joe Mickey & Sazzy Varga / founders of the Tibetan Photo Project
All copyrights the Tibetan Photo Project
• China's takeover of Tibet began in 1949.
• Beijing's brutal policies remain intact. In a population of 6 million Tibetans, Chinese government forces have caused the deaths of 1.2 million Tibetans by execution, torture, starvation, forced labor and imprisonment. Of 6,000 monasteries only 13 remain.
• In 1989 the exiled leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama won the Nobel Peace Prize He accepted on behalf of the Tibetan people and their efforts to find a peaceful solution to China's brutal occupation of Tibet. The Dalai Lama was among the first with a $30k donation to victims of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in New York. The complete text of his letter to President Bush on the attack on the World Trade Center can be found at www.tibet.com.
• Over 135,000 Tibetans live in exile with between 1,500 and 3,500 escaping into Nepal and India each year.
• Tibet's exile community offers great insight into the nature of the Chinese leaders at a time when Beijing’s role on the stage of world events is expanding rapidly.
My contact with the Tibetan monks began on the Mendocino stop of their 1999 American cultural tour. I had the privilege of a photo-op and an interview with a Lama.
At that time, I was beginning a great deal of research on the Tibetan accusations of abuse at the hands of the Chinese government. In "Tears of Blood - A Cry for Tibet" by Mary Craig and "In Exile From the Land of Snows" by John Avedon, I had read the accounts of terrible atrocities suffered at the hands of the Chinese government forces told by Tibetans who had escaped to India.
The follow-up research consisted of reviewing news from major media sources in print, broadcast and on the Web. I wanted to sort out any Tibetan propaganda from the facts. I have developed a hard copy file that numbers about 2,500 articles. They cover all aspects of recent developments in China.
With regards to the Tibetans, the file confirms the claims of horrific methods regularly employed by the Chinese government. China officially labels torture as "Reeducation". Beijing labels accounts of torture "the propaganda of splittists" and "internal matters", and of no concern for the international community
During my meeting with the Tibetans I was introduced to a sponsorship program for Tibetan monks living in one of the Buddhist monasteries they have recreated in India. I send a small monthly amount (to a cause that I have thoroughly researched) and enjoy a slow but rewarding correspondence with Jam Yang Norbu.
There is no instant messenger or e-mail. This is all handled by regular mail. When my letters arrive in India they wait at the monastery for available translators. Norbu responds in an original Tibetan script that he gives the translators and it is eventually typed up on a manual typewriter and sent to me. The process of a single communication cycle can easily take six to ten weeks.
I have been a photographer for over 30 years and I immediately began to package up point-and-shoot cameras and added the basics rules of good photography to my letters. From Jam Yang Norbu I learned that the camera was a new concept for Tibetans dedicated to rebuilding and preserving their culture.
The first roll of photos was processed in India and I received a set of prints. From the start, Jam Yang Norbu and his friends paid great attention to the basic lessons in photography and produced a series of well-lit but posed images.
On the receiving end, this was still, nothing less than a magic view into another world. More importantly, the view was not being provided by an outsider looking in through a lens and preconceived notions. I was being given the vantage point from the inside.
I immediately sent a small flood of cameras and film and in correspondence we discussed how photography could be used as a tool in their efforts to preserve Tibetan culture if he could record his friends living that culture on film. Again, the monks have paid very good attention and I have been given the gift of rare glimpses into the lives of some of the 2,500 monks of the Drepung Monastery.
What has been revealed in the photos and the letters is a dedicated group of men living and struggling and very often laughing through lives that have very few needs or desires. They work with complete dedication to preserve the best of Tibetan culture.
Conclusion
Belief in any religion is a matter of personal temperament and life history. At best I classify myself as a skeptical agnostic. Tibetan Buddhism is based in a moderate or balanced form of the practice. Studies have shown that elements of Tibetan Buddhist mind training, meditation and prayer and Tibetan medicines offer the potential for better mental and physical health. What has captured my interest in the Tibetan struggle is the injustice of China's occupation of Tibet. The strength of their peaceful struggle holds a mirror for the world to see the reflection of the brutal nature of the leadership in Beijing.
Tibetans are not all pacifists. Many would be happy to regain Tibet by force, and while not a realistic possibility, that option for a solution is as much a part of their collective thought as any other group of oppressed people. But through my research and contact with Jam Yang Norbu, I have also discovered the power of peaceful resolve of the human spirit that can only be found in rare and great people, past and present.
Beyond the myths of Shangri-La, their culture and history has all the human flaws but, as Tibetans stand at the edge of a violent forced extinction, they have not given up the search for the soul, heart and true purpose behind the gift of human existence. History says they will prevail. Over 2500 years, kingdoms, nations, and dynasties have fallen, while the simple monks have walked a continuous path through the changing centuries. My conclusion, which has grown stronger in light of recent events, We certainly need their examples more than they need ours.
Over the past two years China has grown its economy between 7 and 8 percent. Over the same period, Beijing has increased military spending at 12 and 17. China is at the manufacturing end of the supply line for many weapons purchased by countries that support terrorism. Two days before the attack on the World Trade Center, the Chinese government issued a statement in support of Yasser Arafat. News of China's controversial entry into the WTO was overshadowed by the terrorist attack on New York. China has offered little official response to the terrorists’ attacks in New York on Sept. 11.
(No endorsements or associations are made or implied. Research all organizations before donating or supporting)
Visit http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com
Help grow this voice from Tibet in exile. Please consider adding a link to the project or as a signature to all your emails and Web postings.
 E-Mail: tibetanphotoproject2@hotmail.com  Website: http://www.tibetanphotoproject.com
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| Read more about: globalisering | | supplements | | | Yes, first collection of photos by Tibetans | Joe Micke, Co-founder - 16.05.2004 21:00
For clarification, This is the first organized collection of photos taken by Tibetans living in exile gaing both media attention and exhibits.
There are many great collections, but for the most part, they have been created by the Western eye looking in.
Thank you for your comments.
Visually and respectfully, Joe Mickey
| | Dalai Lama: absolute monarch or anarchist? | anti theocrat - 17.05.2004 00:00
The article above here praises the absolute political cum religious leader in exile of Tibet, the Dalai Lama.
However, below, an interesting article from 'The Blanket'. It exists as a
commitment to freedom of speech and is contributed by Irish Republicans, Irish
Socialists and Internationalists.
Its purpose is to facilitate analysis, debate and discussion,
to resist censorship, and to create the space for a diversity of views. This
article below (although not agreeing 100% with it's analysis), is nevertheless
an attempt to expose the reactionary nature of the 'Free Tibet Movement', how it
is interlinked with Imperialism and has no progressive content what so ever.
http://lark.phoblacht.net/freetibetlor.html
Free Tibet?
Liam O Ruairc • 12 May 2004
In Western countries, the movement to 'free Tibet' from Chinese occupation is
very popular among the 57 different varieties of liberals and human rights
campaigners. The media generally presents a very positive image of Buddhism, the
Dalai Lama is hailed as a modern saint, and an idealized image of Tibet before
the Chinese take over is given. However, it is worth examining what sort of
place Tibet was before the Chinese intervention, who benefited and who lost from
it, and who the people campaigning for 'free Tibet' are (1).
In Tibet, prior to the Chinese take over, theocratic despotism had been the rule
for generations. An English visitor to Tibet in 1895, Dr. A. L. Waddell, wrote
that the Tibetan people were under the "intolerable tyranny of monks" and the
devil superstitions they had fashioned to terrorize the people. In 1904 Perceval
Landon described the Dalai Lama's rule as "an engine of oppression" and "a
barrier to all human improvement." At about that time, another English traveler,
Captain W.F.T. O'Connor, observed that "the great landowners and the priests . .
. exercise each in their own dominion a despotic power from which there is no
appeal," while the people are "oppressed by the most monstrous growth of
monasticism and priest-craft the world has ever seen." Tibetan rulers, like
those of Europe during the Middle Ages, "forged innumerable weapons of
servitude, invented degrading legends and stimulated a spirit of superstition"
among the common people (Stuart Gelder and Roma Gelder, The
Timely Rain: Travels in New Tibet, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964,
123-125). In Tibet, slavery was the rule.
The following account was written by Sir Charles Bell, who was the British
administrator for Chumbi Valley in 1904-05: "'Slaves were sometimes stolen, when
small children, from their parents. Or the father and mother, being too poor to
support their child, would sell it to a man, who paid them _sho-ring_, "price of
mother's milk," brought up the child and kept it, or sold it, as a slave. These
children come mostly from south-eastern Tibet and the territories of the wild
tribes who dwell between Tibet and Assam.' (Charles Bell, Tibet: Past and
Present, Oxford, 1924, pp. 78-79. Taken from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/tibet-faq)
In 1953, six years before the Chinese takeover, the greater part of the rural
population (some 700,000 of an estimated total population of 1,250,000) were
serfs. Serfs and other peasants generally received no schooling or medical care.
They spent most of their time working for the monasteries and high-ranking
lamas, or for a secular aristocracy that numbered not more than 200 families.
They were in practice owned by their masters who told them what crops to grow
and what animals to raise. They could not get married without the consent of
their lord or lama. A serf might easily be separated from his family should the
owner send him to work in a distant location. Serfs could be sold by their
masters, or subjected to torture and death (for more details see
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html).
Whatever wrongs and new oppressions introduced by the Chinese in Tibet after
1959, they did abolish slavery and the serfdom system of unpaid labor. They
started work projects, and greatly reduced unemployment and beggary. They built
the only hospitals that exist in the country, and established secular education,
thereby breaking the educational monopoly of the monasteries. They constructed
running water and electrical systems in Lhasa. They also put an end to
floggings, mutilations, and amputations as a form of criminal punishment under
Buddhist rule. Chinese rule in Tibet has often been brutal, however its extent
has often been exaggerated.
The accusations made by the Dalai Lama himself about Chinese mass sterilization
and forced deportation of Tibetans, for example, have remained unsupported by
any evidence. Both the Dalai Lama and his advisor and youngest brother, Tendzin
Choegyal, claimed that more than 1.2 million Tibetans are dead as a result of
the Chinese occupation. This figure is more than dubious. The official 1953
census, six years before the Chinese take over, recorded the entire population
of Tibet at 1,274,000. Other estimates varied from one to three million. Other
census counts put the ethnic Tibetan population within the country at about two
million (Pradyumna P. Karan, The Changing Face of Tibet: The Impact of Chinese
Communist Ideology on the Landscape, Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of
Kentucky, 1976, 52-53). If the Chinese killed 1.2 million then entire cities and
huge portions of the countryside, indeed almost all of Tibet, would have been
depopulated - something for which there is no
evidence. The Chinese military force in Tibet was not large enough to round up,
chase, and exterminate that many people even if it had spent all its time doing
this.
It is worth examining who is behind the 'Free Tibet' movement. The former elites
lost many of their privileges due to the Chinese takeover. The family of the
Dalai Lama lost no fewer than 4000 slaves! It is thus not surprising that feudal
lords should campaign against the social gains of Maoism. Their campaign has
found an international echo thanks to the CIA. Throughout the 1960s the Tibetan
exile community received $1.7 million a year from the CIA, according to
documents released by the State Department in 1998. The Dalai Lama's
organization itself admits that it had received millions of dollars from the CIA
during the 1960s to send armed squads of exiles into Tibet to undermine the
Maoist revolution. The Dalai Lama's annual share was $186,000, making him a paid
agent of the CIA. Indian intelligence also financed him and other Tibetan exiles
(Jim Mann, "CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in '60s, Files Show," Los Angeles
Times, 15 September 1998; and New York Times, 1 October, 1998).
Today, mostly through the National Endowment for Democracy and other conduits
that are more respectable-sounding than the CIA, the US Congress continues to
allocate an annual $2 million to Tibetans in India, with additional millions for
"democracy activities" within the Tibetan exile community (See Kenneth Conboy
and James Morrison, The CIA's Secret War in Tibet, Lawrence, Kansas: University
of Kansas Press, 2002, for example).
Also, while presenting himself as a defender of human rights, the Dalai Lama
supports more than dubious causes. For example, in April 1999, along with
Margaret Thatcher and George Bush senior, the Dalai Lama called upon the British
government to release Augusto Pinochet.
While Chinese rule is resented by many in Tibet, people are also afraid to loose
the social gains of Maoism. A 1999 story in the Washington Post notes that the
Dalai Lama continues to be revered in Tibet, but "few Tibetans would welcome a
return of the corrupt aristocratic clans that fled with him in 1959 and that
comprise the bulk of his advisers. Many Tibetan farmers, for example, have no
interest in surrendering the land they gained during China's land reform to the
clans. Tibet's former slaves say they, too, don't want their former masters to
return to power. "I've already lived that life once before," said Wangchuk, a
67-year-old former slave who was wearing his best clothes for his yearly
pilgrimage to Shigatse, one of the holiest sites of Tibetan Buddhism. He said he
worshipped the Dalai Lama, but added, "I may not be free under Chinese
communism, but I am better off than when I was a slave." (John Pomfret, "Tibet
Caught in China's Web," Washington Post, 23 July 1999)
(1) This article has benefited greatly from much of the information contained in
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html.
| | clarification | linking - 17.05.2004 00:44
Dear Joe Micke,
I trust your input on this but your claim that this be the first photos by or of Tibetans themselves seems somewhat spurious to me. I had the good fortune to visit one of the Bylakuppe monasteries myself in the early '90's. They seemed very able to fend for and represent themselves. The tone of your posting which seems aimed at promoting your site tends to detract from your general advocated aim somehow.
That is not to detract from your advocated purpose of course. But if you're serious about your efforts you could start off by including some obvious human rights groups in your links section for instance. It's hardly like you're the first one to notice something is amiss in Tibet.
In solidarity.
| | For Linking / on the ongoing evolution | Joe Mickey - 17.05.2004 19:22
Thank you for your comment. Perhaps another clarification on "First photos" There have been a great many collections and books and most have been created by the west looking in. What this effort attempts to do is make an organized effort to create a collection of photos taken by the Tibetans and present their view of the West.
Since 2000 this has been an evolutionary project that simply began on a lark by sending a camera to a sponsored monk who wrote back and said " I am still a beginner and am not sure what to photograph and with no experience and no culture based on photography I can now better understand how photos can make friends for Tibet."
What the project has created is a vehicle for several publications that otherwise would not write for their readers on Tibet. Please visit our media page. In print alone, the combined circulation that have used the project to write about Tibet in exile now exceeds 20 million.
As for linking the many human rights groups, we offer a connect with Tibet page which we purposely keep very narrow, only to maintain the focus on the voice of the Tibetans and from those links I think every group can be found.
This effort continues to evolve and grow in spite of the fact that we have virtually no money to fund it. In the coming 12 months, two exhibits will open in the U.S. and this development will result in the Ability to bring in a Tibetan from India who will speak about Tibet.
I think what anyone has to realize is that this is an ongoing process to develop another tool that helps connect a great many people who have very little awareness about Tibet and China and we are learning how to make it work as a voice from Tibetans one step at a time. We welcome any tips anyone might have.
We appreciate any input and criticism and comment and are also happy to take personal emails at  tibetanphotoproject2@hotmail.com and we appreciate everyone who takes the time to write.
visually and respectfully, Joe Mickey
| | Happy to learn about more collections | Joe Mickey - 17.05.2004 20:17
Just an additional post script: we would very much like to learn about any other media, gallery, book or other collections of photos by Tibetans if you are aware of then and any information that would allow us to follow up... Again personal emails are appreciated at tibetanphotoproject2@hotmail.com
Visually and Respectfully, Joe Mickey
| | Response to anti theocrat | Joe Mickey - 17.05.2004 20:34
I would certainly take issue with your opening statement . But beyond that, I think every country can be beat over the head with its own history and every leadership will, over its lifetime show errors in judgement. Coming into exile, created enormous challenges to build a community and that required funding.
I also think you have to take into account the nature of various eras between nations.
You also have to recognize the evolution of any culture as changes do not come overnight. And you have to make contact with the people themselves.
As for the Washington post article... I wonder if you also saw the page 1 article in USA today that gave an extensive review of how the Tibetans have not been the benficiaries of China's growth into Tibet.
While your information is valid, your effort is designed to only look in one direction to validate a point of view... The truth is usually somewhere in the middle... I have added your resources to our extensive collection of resouces used in our ongoing research.
Thank you for taking the time.
Visually and respectfully, Joe Mickey
P.S. Generally I do not participate in ongoing debate but am happy to have discussions by email regarding our efforts and research.
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