Lamas, Princes and Brigands: Photographs by Joseph Rock of the Tibetan Borderlands of China
喇嘛、王子与强盗：约瑟夫•罗克的摄影

The thousands of photographs taken by the self-trained botanist Joseph Rock during his adventurous travels through the Chinese-Tibetan borderlands from 1922 to 1949 provide important historical, social, political, and religious records. In addition to their documentation of many lost traditions and their undoubtedly aesthetic and human appeal, these pictures also serve to immediately remind us of the long historical relationship between China and Tibet, a relationship that evolved on the frontiers where people met in war, trade, and pilgrimage and in the fields where the writ of their governments barely existed at all. This exhibition contained 125 photographs from Rock, presenting the people, cultures, and geography of these important borderlands.