No one came to meet me, 2011-2013

 

This work is inspired by a series of National Geographic articles written between 1924 and 1935 by the ethnographer, botanist and photographer Joseph Francis Rock. "No one came to meet me" was a driving anxiety for Rock as he made his way across the borderlands of Tibet and China — hoping to be mistaken for a foreign prince, he made sure his entourage carried him into any new village or town. His documentation of tribes, local Buddhist rituals and a foreign landscape of snow-spiked peaks, high plateaus and wide rivers stimulated the Western imagination and is said to have inspired James Hilton's "Lost Horizon" — ultimately spawning the modern myth of Shangri-La.

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I first encountered Rock when I stumbled across a stack of his National Geographic articles at my parents' house over a decade ago. It turned out they had been collecting them. My parents are part of the first generation of Western Tibetan Buddhist practitioners — their teacher grew up in Kham, one of the regions Rock documented. Reading those articles for the first time I felt that peculiar mix of fascination and nausea that comes with seeing something personal transmogrified into an object seen through another's lens. Using Rock's photographs from 1924/25 as a starting place, these hybrid collages and prints draw on the ethnographic catalogue to postulate a series of new "objects" of encounter.

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see also Within the Faint Positive