Events

Past Event

Photography and Tibet: Politics, Aesthetics and Agency in Tibet Photography / Clare Harris

February 21, 2023
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
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Hybrid Event. In-Person location: Butler Library 522/523

Speaker: Clare Harris is Professor of Visual Anthropology at the University of Oxford, Curator for Asian Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of the British Academy. She has published widely on art, museums, colonialism and collecting, photography, and the politics of representation with special reference to Tibet and the Tibetan diaspora. Her award-winning books include ‘The Museum on the Roof of the World: Art, Politics and the Representation of Tibet’ (2012). Her latest curatorial project with a Tibetan artist was ‘Performing Tibetan Identities’, an exhibition featuring the work of the Lhasa-based photographer and designer, Nyema Droma.

Moderator: Lauran Hartley, Director, Modern Tibetan Studies Program

This event is part of the MTSP "Women in Tibetan Studies" Series, with funding from the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

From the earliest attempts to capture Tibet with the camera in the mid-nineteenth century, photographs have been used to create visual narratives about the country and its people and to perform in politicised debates about them. Initially, outsiders from both East and West dominated the practice of enlisting photography to construct representations of Tibet ranging from the positive to the malign. However, by the early twentieth century, Tibetans themselves began to take up the camera and to deploy it in ways that deviate from those externally produced stereotypes. In this talk, Clare Harris, explores some of the modes in which photographs have been instrumentalised by insiders and outsiders and critically evaluates the history of Tibet photography. The talk will be an overview of some of the arguments presented in her book, ‘Photography and Tibet’, and illustrated with many of the rare images she has unearthed in archives and elsewhere over the course of more than twenty years of research on the subject.

Hybrid event. In-person location: Butler Library, Room 522/523.

Register to attend event in-person HERE. Please note that non-CUID holders need to show proof of their primary series and one booster dose of COVID-19 vaccines.

Register for Zoom HERE.

Watch video recording of event HERE.

Contact Information

Lauran Hartley