By Dave Ford
In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads — as an anthology of images.Susan Sontag, “On Photography,” 1977
The photograph, set in Tibet, is in muted blacks and whites – really, browns and creams, shaded with soft shadows. At the top of the frame, large Tibetan prayer wheels spin. In the foreground, young boys play gleefully. It takes a moment for a viewer to note that one holds a gun.
“I wasn’t sure if it was a play gun or not,” says San Francisco photographer Jo Farrell. “The closer I look, the more real it looks.”
The photograph is one of about 25 in Farrell’s exhibition, “Shambala: Spirit of Tibet,” at a local design studio through the end of the month.
Farrell says the juxtaposition of the prayer wheels and the child’s gun (real or not) symbolizes changes happening in Tibet since the Chinese invaded 54 years ago. Ten years after that, the Chinese army squashed demonstrations in Lhasa, the country’s capital, that were protesting the Chinese occupation. The country’s temporal and spiritual leader, the 14th Dalai Lama, was forced into exile, and the Chinese attempted to shut some monasteries and squelch the practice of Buddhism. In its place they began a program of relentless modernizing.
“This is a changing world, completely,” Farrell says of the country. “Yet I believe the Tibetans are hanging on to their own culture through it.”
Farrell first traveled to Tibet in 1998, and returned in December and January. A London native who moved to San Francisco nine years ago, Farrell, who is 38, also has traveled to — and photographed — China, India, Cuba, Japan and Mexico. She sees her work as preserving views of cultures in danger of disappearing. “I always say that every culture is endangered,” she says. “To hang onto a piece of that is so beautiful. That’s what the Tibetans are doing.”
That much is evident in the “Shambala” photographs, which show Tibetans in everyday circumstances. In one, young monks engage in vigorous debate as part of their rigorous academic training. They are a blur as they leap, clap hands and orate. Another shows Tibetans prostrating themselves in prayer. A third shows a man, woman and child sitting at a table and slurping from noodle bowls. They are almost entirely hidden behind flanks of yak meat hung from a rope.
“I think her work is absolutely brilliant in terms of capturing something that tends to go by us in the modern world,” says Jonina Skaggs, a co-partner in Skaggs Design, the advertising and design firm hosting the show. “There’s very little information about how these people actually live.”
Some of the photos display in pointed ways just how cultures are clashing in Tibet. A shot taken at a street market near the Potola Palace, the Dalai Lama’s home before his exile, shows a table laden with images for sale. One is of Chairman Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader responsible for the invasion of Tibet. Next to it is one of David Beckham, the English soccer star and global celebrity.
“The changes are not just because of the Chinese,” Farrell says. “Modernization would have gotten them. They all want Levi’s and Nikes.” She adds, “The Tibetans I knew were all learning English.”
John Perino, a photographer and the owner of Focus Gallery, in San Francisco, applauds Farrell’s observational skills. “Sometimes it is our American eyes that kind of project into these other cultures, and many times we’re incorrect in what we project,” he says. But, he adds, “I don’t think she’s there to save Tibet. I think she’s there to see what’s going on …, like (in) the picture with those kids with guns, when you would think they’re all sitting around meditating like the Dalai Lama.”
Farrell’s father, Sir Terry Farrell, is an architect and urban designer renowned internationally. He lives in London. In March he was chosen as the first “design czar” for the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Jo Farrell says her father’s vocation influenced her. “It’s a lot about light and form,” she says of her work.
Architects appear to agree. Julia Campbell is a senior project manager and designer at the San Francisco firm Gensler Architects, and has bought three of Farrell’s photographs. “They’re really textural,” says Campbell, who, like Farrell, is a London native who moved to San Francisco. “As an architect I’ve always been interested in spatial things, and what I like about her photos is that you start looking at them and you get more and more detail, and it draws you in.”
Another early influence on Farrell were the American black and white films of the 1930s and 1940s that she watched religiously every Sunday on British television. She collected stills from such movies, drawn to their use of shadow and light. “That, I think, is what made me interested in black and white photography,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s like I see in black and white – – it’s kind of weird.”
The power of black and white photography rests, in part, in its ability to create an alternate world for people accustomed to seeing in color, erasing some natural distractions. “You look at a picture that’s full of beautiful colors, and you go, ‘Look at that red, look at that turquoise,’ ” Farrell says. “And you can miss a lot of that emotion that black and white can give.”
Emotions in Farrell’s work run the gamut, but, because the work focuses on disappearing cultures, there is an overlay of sadness and loss. Farrell says she sees the world changing faster than even 20 years ago. “I think it’s because of things like the Internet,” she says. “That has opened up a whole new world.”
And it has changed the old one. Farrell recalls visiting Internet cafes in Tibet and China. Where once young men might have socialized by playing cards or dominos, she found them sitting in the darkened cafes and playing video games — alone. “They spend a lot of hours there,” she says. “This is now their culture.”
More sinister changes are afoot, too. For the first time, Tibet has seen a rise in prostitution among young girls, Farrell says, an observation confirmed last December by a report from the Tibet Information Network, a news and research service focused on the country. (“Though the fast-growing sex trade is still dominated by Chinese sex workers, the number of Tibetan prostitutes, still marginal only a few years ago, has lately been on the rise, ” the group reported.) The girls head for cities from poor rural areas, hoping to make money to support their relatives back home. Jobless, they turn to selling themselves. “They never had that before,” Farrell says. “I can see it happening so easily — and it’s so sad.”
Encountering such shifts is part of the gamble of travel, which Farrell fell in love with on her first big family trip as a child — a cruise to America aboard the QEII, which docked in New York. “They slowed the boat down so you’d see the Statue of Liberty at dawn,” she says — an undeniably moving sight.
When she was 21, Farrell wanted to take a break after organizing an exhibition for the 30,000-member Royal Institute of British Architects. All her friends had gone away on holiday. A newspaper ad for cheap trips to Austria caught her eye, and she went – by herself. From then on, independent travel appealed to her. “I get to these places and move around on my own, unencumbered by other people and their decisions,” she says, adding with a laugh, “My family called me Indiana Jo.”
Like all travelers, Farrell has stories. She tells of walking on a lane in Cuba and being approached by a black man. He was 19, and a boxer. He struck up a pleasant conversation, but as the pair got into more and more remote areas, Farrell’s internal safety sensors sounded mild alarms. When the man suggested she repair with him to his family’s home for coffee, she said, she became even more uneasy.
“But here came his dad, pedaling a pedal-cycle taxi, and they took me to their house — really, just a shack,” she says. “They gave me coffee, then brought out a book — and there were all their photographs.”
Later, the young man and his father took her back to where she was staying, and the trio went out to a club to hear music. Farrell noticed the young man nervously looking over his shoulder as he danced. She asked why. “I’m looking for the police,” the man told her. It turned out that locals weren’t allowed in the club, the clientele of which were tourists and the town’s rich people. “There were other boys outside, peering in the window,” Farrell says, shaking her head.
Farrell evinces little patience for resorts like the one she saw on a Cuba beach that seemed to leach authenticity from the area. “It felt like Disney World, a false world set up,” she says. A week or so before that, she’d gone to a seaside area free of tourists. “There were pigs running around the beach, and a guy giving us oranges,” she recalls. “An English guy with us was playing the flute. (The natives) were amazed by it. So they cut down bamboo shoots and made holes in them to make flutes. You feel like you’re giving back and interacting.”
Incidents such as these, she says, have given her a fairly optimistic view of humanity. “The majority of the time (people are) willing to welcome me and help me,” she says. “The only place I’ve been scared is in America. It’s because of the gun culture.”
Although photography claims all of her passion and most of her time, Farrell does consulting work in Quark Xpress and In Design software, and teaches a class in them at the multimedia studies department of San Francisco State University. Never having attended university — she began working for London publishers of architectural and art books at 18 — she is studying cultural anthropology at State to deepen her photography work. She hopes to spend a long period — six or more months — in China and Tibet in the next year to continue documenting changes there.
As she puts it, “It’s about capturing something before it’s gone.”
