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In my photos in the 1970s I documented the rehabilitation work and religious gatherings of the Tibetans. I worked with Sakya Trizin, head of the Sakya tradition of Buddhism in Tibet, to raise funds to develop the Sakya Centre and the Sakya College in Rajpur, North India, and improve conditions for the children, students and adults. Most of the photos I took were to illustrate fund-raising proposals. I studied for four years with painter Gegen Pema Konchog while he was creating a series of massive murals at the recently finished Clementown temple, with the help of a number of students. When the temple was finished, Dilgo Khentse Rinpoche was invited to teach a compendium of meditational practices. The murals can be seen in the slide of the teaching.
In 1984 I started a project of photographing Tibetan craft workers. Carpet-making was a common source of income in the Tibetan settlements. Fabrics were woven, and silversmiths and bronze-casters worked in the communities. Wood-block, the traditional method of printing books, had been overtaken by photo offset, but blocks were still carved for printing prayer flags. Young Tibetan teachers, trained in Indian colleges, gave basic education in the settlements.
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