Danny Conant of Chevy Chase traveled multiple times to heavily restricted region
by Andrew Ujifusa | Staff Writer
Danny Conant hopes her pictures of Tibet don’t just speak a thousand words — she wants them to send a message.
The 79-year-old Town of Chevy Chase resident, who took up photography 25 years ago with no formal training after a career as a Bethesda schoolteacher, has traveled four times since 1995 to the restricted area occupied by China. On film, she has captured everything from boy monks to elderly women going about their everyday routines, trying to portray their difficult lives with unstinting realism.
She has composed two photo collections in book form — “Tibetan Journey” and “Vanishing Tibet” — about her experiences. “Vanishing Tibet” was published in 2008 following her final visit to Tibet in 2002.
“The whole object is to show what is happening in Tibet. … the Chinese are taking away the whole culture of the people,” said Conant, a former teacher at Norwood School who was inspired to take up photography after a vacation made her wish she had photography skills.
The country still arouses strong feelings in her. Regarding the Tibetan Dalai Lama’s visit with President Barack Obama last week, Conant said, “I was really sort of annoyed that he hadn’t talked to the Dalai Lama before.”
Her partner on the four Tibetan trips and co-author of “Vanishing Tibet,” Catherine Steinmann, was amazed by Conant’s unwillingness to be deterred by difficult photographic situations, especially given her age, and the way she was able to portray people, especially children.
“She captured them in a way that not too many people do, and she could capture their soul,” said Steinmann, a New York-based photographer who has traveled with Conant for 17 years.
Conant’s Tibetan odyssey began in the 1980s when, on a trip to southeast China, she looked out her hotel window one day and saw a man dressed, as she described it, in a leopard skin draped across his chest, tall fur boots, and a hat about as tall as his head. After she learned that the man was Tibetan, she decided she had to visit the region.
But not until 1995 did she actually reach Tibet. Conant says this was because of procedural roadblocks thrown up by the Chinese that prevented her from getting to the region. During her first trip, she saw a truck that turned out to be full of political prisoners being displayed to city residents by Chinese authorities as a warning.
Her subsequent visits have involved overnight stays at monasteries and trudges through mounds of yak dung to and from her tent, which she pitched in farm fields when city accommodations were undesirable.
And whenever she wanted to take pictures, she would hold up her camera for all to see and smile, so she didn’t sneak up on people. Chinese military, police officers and bridges, meanwhile, were off-limits to her camera.
“I’m a little old lady in tennis shoes, so I’m not threatening,” Conant said with a laugh.
Her photography began to focus on the everyday life of Tibetans and small details in those lives. A photo shows one man pushing off from shore in a boat made of yak skin. In one other shot, children are learning English in a classroom. In another, a woman is cleaning a prayer wheel. Conant noted that women in Tibet never seemed to stop moving their hands, even threading yak tail hair as they walked to work.
She was struck by the spirituality of the Tibetan people and their connections to Buddhist worship, and Conant said she always had invitations from Tibetans to have tea in their homes, even as they struggled for food and survival every day.
Back in her Chevy Chase studio, meanwhile, Conant used nontraditional ways to display those Tibetans she photographed. Some pictures she transferred to traditional Tibetan paper with yak hair mounted on the sides, and others to plaster blocks. She treated photos in “Vanishing Tibet” to make them grainier and textured to give them a “timeless” air of traditional Tibetan life, she said.
Conant said she probably won’t return to Tibet, both because of her age and the Chinese government’s likely disapproval of what she has produced. But she said she hopes her photos do provide people with a window into lives that are so heavily controlled and dictated by others.
“I saw people living happily with practically nothing,” she said. “It made me think I had too much.”
