By Wasfia Nazreen
Dharamshala, April 15 – Dr. Clare Harris, Lecturer and Curator for Asia, Pitt Rivers Museum and School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, just finished her visit to Dharamsala to promote an interactive web archive that depicts Tibet visually, as captured through both colonial and post-colonial periods. This website is to be officially launched at the end of 2007. The honorary photographers of this never-published collection are Sir Charles Bell, Frederick Spencer Chapman, Hugh Richardson, Sir Evan Nepean, Harry Stanton and Arthur Hopkins.
When asked about the motivation behind this work to take the wonderful shape it did at the present, Dr. Harris revealed that it was initiated back in 1984 when she came to Tibetan Homes Foundation in Missouri, one of the oldest Homes Community. That trip eventually led her to fall in love with India as a whole, and also ignited her to invest her talents towards Tibetan art. What started as a personal passion slowly became an academic project. She used the date of His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama forcefully having to leave Lhasa, as a marking point of her PhD. research studies, the result of which in physical realms is her second book (listed below). It was also troublesome for her, being an art history enthusiast, to know that most Western literature contained Tibet’s history through visual depiction only till 1900. Thus her journey began, of a lifetime commitment to scholarly research, from Thanka paintings to Photographs to the entire visual culture of Tibetan Art.
This two and half-years of hard work, a cutting-edge 21st century manifestation, can be found at http://tibet.prm.ox.ac.uk. The website has been reported to have some loading errors at times, because of the large number of hits it receives per day. It is apparently accessible from Lhasa at the moment, which is sure to change in the coming times as those in charge gain more awareness.
The project has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (department under British Government). Within this site are 6000 photographs, both black and white and colored, that can be used for the purpose of research, and other non-publishing endeavors. The smooth technicality of the server lets one to navigate around categorized albums, email photographs to others as well as to create personal albums and provide feedbacks for the museum. Tibetans all over the world are also invited to identify any of the people of the images, if it has not already been done.
Dr. Clare Harris is the author of the books In the Image of Tibet: Tibetan Painting after 1959 (published 1999), Seeing Lhasa: British depictions of Tibetan Capital, 1936-1947 (published 2003 with co-author Tsering Shakya), and editor of Ladakh: Culture at the crossroads (published 2005 by Monisha Ahmed).
