6-8PM
Tibet House US
22 W 15th St (Bet. 5th & 6th Aves)
New York, NY 10011
“Tibet with
its vast spaces was created for panoramas." - Jaroslav Poncar
Jaroslav
Poncar’s photographs of Tibet were taken over four extensive journeys more than
twenty years ago. On his journey to Tibet in 1985, he travelled overland from
Chengdu to Lhasa, and further to the former kingdom Guge in the extreme West,
experiencing the country as it looked ages ago. In 1985, a German travel agency
obtained an authorization to organize the first journey to the sacred Mount
Kailash in West Tibet. The camera manufacturer Olympus sponsored Poncar’s trip.
In 1987,
Poncar organized an expedition to the Kailash-Manasarovar region to explore the
source area of the Brahmaputra and Indus. He and his film team visited the
source of the Indus 80 years after geographer and explorer Sven Hedin. Poncar
was invited by the University of Vienna to photographically document what was
left of Tholing in 1993 as part of a research project. This was his last visit
to Tibet. He travelled three times from Lhasa to Guge, twice across Chang Tang
via Gertse on the North Route. On all his journeys to the Himalayas and Tibet
since 1976, Poncar traveled with two antique Russian panoramic cameras FT-2.
Jaroslav Poncar was born in Prague in 1945. He now lives in Cologne, where he
was professor at the Department of Imaging Sciences at the University of the
Applied Sciences until his retirement in 2010. His numerous
photography-motivated travels and university projects have taken him to the
Himalayas and Tibet, Central Asia, India and Cambodia. In 1985, he was the
first Westerner to cross Tibet from East to West.
