9 minute read
Ginger Chih discusses her book, The Dalai Lama: Leadership and the Power of Compassion
In Focus
Ginger Chih discusses her book, The Dalai Lama: Leadership and the Power of Compassion, with Nick Hodgson
All images ©Ginger Chih 2024
Born in Beijing to a Chinese father and a mother who is half Japanese and half indigenous Chinese, Ginger Chih is a US-based documentary photographer. Her career has combined her twin skills as a management consultant and executive coach, working in North America, Europe, and Asia, with that of documentary photographer. She holds an MBA from NYU’s Stern School of Business, and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University where she wrote a thesis about multi-cultural workplace dynamics in China. A practising Buddhist, she integrated the teachings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in her professional consulting and coaching work, which resulted in more harmonious workplace relationships and deeper understanding of cultural differences. She took these skills a stage further as a photographer, documenting the Tibetan diaspora and the preservation of its cultural and national identity in exile.
Her photographic work covers the various aspects of the day-to-day Tibetan community engaging in educational, religious, and cultural activities. She has met the Dalai Lama, who has taken a special interest in her project and granted her access to his archival photos, ceremonies, and private living areas. Her book, The Dalai Lama: Leadership and the Power of Compassion, was published by Interlink Publishing in 2020. In 2023 she spoke to members of the RPS Documentary Group Central Region about her book.
Tell us a little more about your background.
My journey started in China, where I was born, although I grew up in Japan. After a year at university in Japan, I moved to the United States to complete my undergraduate studies. I hadn’t realised just how diverse America is. I started getting very involved in the community in New York, where I was living at the time, photographing Chinese Americans, Asian Americans, Black Americans – all sorts of diversity. I printed my monochrome images, taking them to publishing houses to implore them, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to print my work about diversity. So that’s how I started, back in the late 1970’s. In parallel, I needed to earn money, so I worked for a time at UNICEF. My vision in life has always been to try and get people to understand each other better, to appreciate each other more. UNICEF was too bureaucratic for me, so I went into consulting, and ended up living in London and undertaking a doctorate at Cambridge. I became a consultant in crosscultures, mainly for multinational businesses.
I have always studied Tibetan Buddhism, and in 2006 I attended a talk by the Dalai Lama in Zurich which really resonated with me. His mantra is to practice being kind. I studied in India and developed a leadership programme for corporate clients. Along the way I met someone from the Tibet Fund, a US-based non-profit organisation designed to preserve the cultural identity of the Tibetan people, and found they needed documentary photographs of where their communities are located globally – the diaspora, especially those communities in India and Nepal.
So Buddhism has played a major part in your practice?
Studying with the Dalai Lama was transformative for me. I find his teaching very actionable, dialogue-based. I found it all very practical.
How did the project evolve?
Around 85,000 Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile in 1959 (Tibet had already been annexed by China). The Tibetan diaspora live in communities called settlements. The Indian government gave them land to build infrastructure in these settlements such as housing and schools in which they could preserve culture. The main language remains Tibetan, but students also study Hindi and English and some Chinese. The large settlements are in the south of India. The president of the Tibet Fund organised for me to gain access via the Tibetan exiled government together with permission from the Indian authorities. I would stay in monasteries, guest houses, and sometimes in people’s homes within these settlements. Although the Dalai Lama lives in Dharamshala in northern India, the main settlements are in southern India. So I visited around 25 settlements across India, including right up into the Himalayas and also into Nepal.
How did the settlement occupants feel about a photographer being amongst them? Did it take time to build up trust before being able to start shooting?
The whole experience was very positive right from the start. I realised that the settlements have an absolutely brilliant social structure, with an officer who would show me around and make various introductions to camp leaders within the hierarchy who would then take me to the schools and such places. I’m Chinese, and there is a nasty history between the Chinese and Tibetans, and undoubtedly if I’d tried to make this work years earlier, it really wouldn’t have happened. But the Tibetan Buddhists actually really dislike governments, not people, so I had the reverse experience – not that I was Chinese and not Tibetan, but actually positive support for the work I was trying to make. I got such a warm welcome. They would cook for me. Their hospitality was extraordinary. It was compassion in action.
How did you get such amazing access to the Dalai Lama?
Partly introduction, partly luck! In 2018 the Dalai Lama was visiting near me in California where I attended an event, and I subsequently went to Dharamshala in the hope of meeting him. In fact anyone can request this, online. If you’re lucky, you get an email with the opportunity to visit his holiness as part of a group, an audience if you like, and I was lucky enough to receive an email and went along at the appointed time. The Dalai Lama always has a photographer with him. I had taken my camera with me and ended up standing next to his photographer. The Dalai Lama turned to me and asked, “who are you?” and somebody pushed me from behind until I was right in front of him. I introduced myself as a documentary photographer and that my work was commissioned by the Tibet Fund, and he replied, ‘I want to meet you’. Such karma!
I subsequently received an email from one of his secretaries with a time slot to see him and it was clear that he wanted to meet me for my photographs, not simply as a fellow Buddhist. I was also invited to photograph the Tibetan Oracles in his private temple, which is such a privilege. I was the only non-Tibetan there. It really was an amazing experience. Afterwards I met him, and he asked me what I thought of the oracles – such a big question! He then looked at the photographs I had brought with me, making occasional observations. I ended up spending almost two and a half hours with him. I was then invited by him to another meeting, this time at his house to photograph him meditating – just the most incredible access for me to shoot some portraits.
He has a meditation room that’s not very big, but he has a large chair and some LED lights. It’s really dark and quiet in there. I took out my tripod and suddenly the Dalai Lama said ‘I see you need light’ so he moved his LED lights onto his face and invited me to come as close as I wanted. He then went into a deep meditation, and I just started shooting.
This was the first project in my life that I shot digitally, using a Leica Q with a 28mm, not an obvious choice of lens for this sort of work! So I had to get up close, but the results seemed to have worked out well. I subsequently found out that, as a younger man, the Dalai Lama had himself owned a Leica and knew a bit about photography!
This whole process you have described seems so effortless – was it?
Actually, he’s so natural, it was really very straightforward.
How did the book come about?
I started putting it all together during the pandemic, given the free time available. I wrote a 50,000-word manuscript about what I had found, alongside around 100 images, and sent a draft to the Dalai Lama’s office for fact-checking. They responded saying that he would like to write a foreword to the book. That was an amazing moment! I didn’t have a publisher and I had a really hard time finding one, as the Dalai Lama is an issue for a lot of publishers, simply because of distribution and political issues in some countries. Having exhausted many options, I eventually approached Interlink Publishing in Northampton, Massachusetts, which had previously published a book on him but don’t normally work on photography books, and they went for it.
It ended up as a 224-page book of text with 100 colour plates. Whilst I do like working in black-and-white, I shot this project in colour because the Tibetan colour palette is so vibrant, and also because different schools of Buddhism have different colours.
What’s next?
I’ve been doing some talks on my book and hope to continue as the response to my work has been fantastic, which obviously I’m very proud of.
