Snow Lake, Sim-Gang Glacier and The Ogre from the Hispar La (The Karakoram, Pakistan, 1994)
BiblioBuffet Lauren Roberts, Editor
Bibleo-Buffet is a literary journal founded and edited by Lauren Roberts.
From the Editors Desk, June 14, 2009
Traveling the World in Photography
The essay discusses two books unexpectedly received from Fields Publishing: Himalayan Portfolios by Kenneth Hanson and Bolivia by Don McLauglin. Roberts writes: “when books that are exactly in alignment with my personal tastes arrive unexpectedly, well, that is just perfect.” “I have found them so wonderful I wanted to share them with you”
She continues:“Himalayan Portfolios: Journeys of the Imagination is a fine art photography book filled with glorious black-and-white photographs and illustrations of one of earth’s most spectacular areas. This book came out of Kenneth Hanson’s experiences accompanying his wife on her teaching fellowship to India. A side trip to the Himalayas with his 4x5 view camera yielded, as he put it, a journey into “two imaginative realms: that of the Tibetan Buddhist culture . . . [and] that of the mountaineers and explorers. . . .””
Roberts goes on to describe the structure of the book and discusses two representative images: that of the Sherpa village of Namche Bazaar poised in a bowl scooped out of a steep Nepal hillside [1999) and that of a vast open landscape, the Snow Lake, taken in the Karakoram of Pakistan [1944].
Snow Lake, Sim-Gang Glacier and The Ogre from the Hispar La (The
Karakoram, Pakistan, 1994)
She
concludes: “More than a fine art photography book, Himalayan
Portfolios aims to educate the Himalayan admirer about the mountains, the
culture and religion, the people, the impact of the world coming to
its doors, the importance of photography in discovering the Himalayan
story, and much more. This is less a photography book or even a book
of the Himalayas than a book that seeks to understand the life story
of a mountain range. It’s also a tribute to something
ultimately unexplainable, something beyond the ken of human
attributes.”
For
the full essay and the discussed photographs: