The Tibetans

The following is an article that appeared in the National Post, Toronto, May 11, 2000(Headline: Photography book award, by Finbarr O'Reilly, National Post)Vancouver-based photographer Art Perry has won the second Roloff Beny Photography Book Award for The Tibetans. The country's top photography book award, presented last night in Toronto, earns Perry a cash prize of $30,000. His American publisher, Viking Studio/Penguin Putnam, also gets $20,000, while two runners-up, Courtney Milne and Linda Rutenberg, get $5,000 each. Perry, who is a lecturer at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, spent five years travelling throughout Tibet and the exiled Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, documenting with a camera the people he met along the way - monks, nomads, city dwellers. Through the Dalai Lama, Perry gained access to seldom-visited monasteries in remote regions where he captured a traditional way of life that is being threatened by the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In a current project, the Ottawa-born Perry has been documenting in both writing and photographs the fractured cultures of Northern and Southern Ireland. The project, which he began in 1998, is a lifelong dream of Perry, whose family is from Belfast. The award was created in memory of Roloff Beny, a world-renowned photographer who was born in Medicine Hat, Alta., and is intended to encourage excellence in photograph publishing.

The following article appeared in The Vancouver Sun, May 10, 2000'Tibetan images snag major prize for local photographer' by Michael Scott, Sun Visual Art CriticVancouver photographer Art Perry has won a major international award for his large-format photographic book The Tibetans: Photographs. Perry, an instructor at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, becomes the second winner of the $30,000 Roloff Beny Photography Book Award at a ceremony in Toronto. (Magnum photographer Larry Towell received the first Beny Award for his book El Salvador.) The publisher of Perry's 1999 book, Viking Studio (an imprint of Penguin Books), will share in the award, receiving a $20,000 prize of its own. Perry spent five years collecting images of Buddhist societies in the Himalayas, working primarily in Tibet, but travelling also to Ladakh and Nepal. Last year, the Washington Post named his book one of the year's 10 best. A Vancouver Sun reviewer wrote: "Perry takes us from the slightly familiar markets and brothels of Lhasa clear through to the monasteries and mountaintops that have not been otherwise documented. The text is as clear-eyed as the pictures, but the message it contains is not entirely pretty. Though Buddhism practiced by the Tibetans will certainly endure, Tibetan Buddhist culture is very much under attack, perhaps by we western cultural imperialists, certainly by the country's Chinese occupiers. Read it, or just look at the pictures, and those Free Tibet bumper stickers will seem a lot more immediate." Here in Vancouver, Perry teaches a multi-disciplinary course at Emily Carr on the history of bohemianism - a course that covers film, punk rock and jazz as well as visual art. (I start by telling my students to stay up all night before coming to class," he jokes.) Perry also teaches a course in contemporary literature, a field that has sparked his interest in his own Irish roots. He says he will spend part of the Beny prize money on a sabbatical year in County Monaghan in northern Ireland. Perry plans to pursue both writing and photography during this time. "I have to say I am very, very honoured to be receiving this award," he says. "My father had some of Roloff Beny's big books and I grew up handling those incredible pages. There aren't people in those images, but they were lush and magnificent." Expatriate Canadian photographer Roloff Beny made an international name for himself in the 1970s and early 1980s chronicling a world of sensual beauty, with major large-format books on subjects such as pre-revolutionary Iran and Italy. He died in 1984.

The following is a review of The Tibetans: Photographs by Art Perry that appeared in the December issue of Photo Metro magazine.Perhaps the best book to date on Tibet. This work goes beyond the easy cliche images of dramatic landscapes and content-less smiling figures that populate so many other books. This is no parachute in, shoot pix, and fly out to publishers and galleries book. Perry spent five years on the project and represents both the beauty and the grit of day-to-day life. It shows. The book is quite well designed with intelligent text by Robert Thurman.

The following is a review of Art Perry's The Tibetans: Photographs that appeared in The Washington Post's 'Best Books of 1999,' December 5, 1999.The Tibetans: Photographs, by Art Perry (Viking Studio). 'I had a terrible headache,' the Canadian photographer-author says of his visit with Tibetan nomads. 'On the Chang Tang Plateau it is common for the Himalayan height to push Western visitors to dangerous states of pulmonary and cerebral edema. ... My brain was about to burst, and I could see myself as a future figure of nomadic folklore -- the Westerner whose head exploded.' The nomads worried to see him lying motionless, but a sudden snowstorm on the desert shifted their priorities. They ran from their tents with tea urns, pots and old oil drums abandoned by the Chinese army, and filled them to overflowing with the soft, loose snow. Later, a ginger, garlic and melted snow broth with flakes of dried yak meat,and the prayers of a shaman, eased his aching head. In Lhasa, the author shares vivid, passionate descriptions of the imprint of an invasive Chinese culture: destruction of historic architecture, the proliferation of non-Tibetan stalls hawking 'ugly Asian rip-offs of American products,' 'joyless and cruel' merchants selling half-dead catfish and half-feathered chickens, and garish Chinese brothels. He describes the Khampas of eastern Tibet who, in the face of public executions by Chinese troops, train themselves in commando warfare, no longer believing like most Tibetans that compassion alone can win over evil. His photos of Lhasa are striking. The words and pictures tell of a time and place apart from global culture, compelling in beauty. Perry asks that the hardships of the Tibetan people not be trivialized, that the picturesque not overshadow the difficulties. The sheer humanity in Perry's photos evokes that respect. -- M.M.

Review of The Tibetans: Photographs by Art Perry in Common Boundary, November-December 1999 issue, written by Common Boundary editor Anne A. SimpkinsonThe Tibetans: Photographs by Art PerryDespite unspeakable atrocities, spirited survival. That's the message that photographer and academic lecturer Art Perry conveys in both gripping words and stunning black and white images collected in his recently published book, The Tibetans: Photographs (Viking Studio, a divsion of Penguin Putnam, Inc., 1999). From the onset - in the introduction by Robert A.F. Thurman, Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University in New York City, and in the author/photographer's essay - the reader is reminded of the impact of 50 years of Chinese oppression and genocide that claimed 1.2 million Tibetan lives and destroyed over 6,000 Buddhist monasteries, once the spiritual backbone of the country. In fact, it was the Tibetans' stalwart survival of torture, rape, persecution, desecration, and environmental degradation that compelled Perry to journey to the 'Roof of the World.' For five years Perry traveled not only in Tibet but also to Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal. The Vancouver photographer, who is also on the faculty of Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, was determined to shoot pictures that 'speak of a living culture, despite the death and destruction tearing at its soul.' In this, he has admirably succeeded. He has captured the beauty as well as the hardship, the geographic vastness as well as the tiny daily details that make up Tibetan life today. Perry's camera lens rests primarily on nomads and monks. The former he encountered on the harsh Chang Tang Plateau in Ladakh and in the remote Ngari region of western Tibet, home of the 22,000-foot Mt. Kailash, possibly the holiest pilgrimage site in all of Asia. The monks he found by visting about a dozen monasteries, including the once majestic Ganden Monastery that was shelled and dynamited by the Chinese in 1966 and is currently being rebuilt but at an achingly slow pace. Perry's subjects are shown as pensive, fun-loving, prayerful, humble, and hard at work. Their images are sharp and clear as the 'diamond hard light' Perry found on the Chang Tang Plateau, a light, he writes, that inherently carries a 'heightened purity, a profound clarity.' In the end, Perry's portraits of the Tibetan people - their humanity, poverty, warmth, and dignity - testify to their indomitable spirit. Yet, despite their courage and grit, Perry won't let us forget their continuing circumstances, and in fact, leaves readers with a ringing exhortation: 'As you look at the Tibetans in this book, do not forget their story of faith in the face of unimaginable inhumanity.'