Ernst Haas: Himalayan Pilgrimage (Tibet, 1978)
The photographs included in this book were selected from thousands taken over a nine-year period.
The Himilaya is different things to different people. To Indians, it is the Himilaya, the “abode of snow”, mystical home of the gods, source of all their great and sacred rivers. To the rest of the world it is the Himilayas, the highest mountain range on earth, “the roof of the wordl”, where the towering peaks have always attracted adventurers and mountain climbers, as well as seekers of spiritual heights.
For Ernst Haas and his partner G. Minke, the Himalaya of India, and its neighboring countries is home for the Dalai Lama and for thousands of Tibetans who followed their leader into exile after China’s invasion of Tibet in the late 1950s. For years the authors longed to visit Tibet, “the forbidden country” and to study the unique culture and Buddhist religion of its people. In 1968 they were issued permission to begin their pilgrimage - to the refugee settlements of Mussoorie, Darjeeling, and Dharamasala, to Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and to other centers in the Himalaya. They participated in events that few outsiders ever witness - such as the Kalachakra Initiation, at which the fourteenth Dalai Lama officiated before a hundred thousand Lamaists from everywhere in the Himalaya. […] Himilayan Pilgrimage is a sensitive exploration of an area of the world that to most seems something of a fantasy.
*Despite being a master colour and motion photographer, most of Haas’s books are out of print. During his time his colour photography was considered ‘commercial’(cit), and consequently received little support from the art-world. Typically only black and white photography was considered a ‘pure’ art form worthy of museum support, because colour-dye processes were an innovation of the advertising world.
I have been lucky enough to inherit a copy of this out-of-print book, but for others aussie555 has scanned many of the images from Himalayan Pilgrimage, which you can view here.
