“Fresh Memories” documents the stories of Tibetan refugees who have made the dangerous journey from Tibet to exile in India following the Tibetan uprising of March 2008. Traditionally photojournalism has relied upon photographers being first hand observers of history, using the camera as a tool for documentation. However, the political situation in Tibet has rendered this strategy for information gathering and story telling largely unsuccessful. Instead I have been forced to employ alternative tactics, constructing portraits to recount events whose records exist only in the surviving refugees minds as memories, and in their flesh as scars.
“Fresh Memories†documents the stories of Tibetan refugees who have made the dangerous journey from Tibet to exile in India following the Tibetan uprising of March 2008.
Traditionally photojournalism has relied upon photographers being first hand observers of history, using the camera as a tool for documentation. However, the political situation in Tibet has rendered this strategy for information gathering and story telling largely unsuccessful. As no photojournalist's camera can see behind the doors of a Chinese prison, I have been forced to employ alternative tactics to recount events whose records exist only in the surviving refugees minds as memories, and in their flesh as scars. My method is to interview each subject at length. Once I have heard their tales I use devices, such as props, costume and lighting, to construct a portrait of each refugee based upon their testimony.
Ngawang stands alone in a bare concrete room, lit by a small point of light. During the six years he spent in prison for distributing pamphlets, Ngawang was part of a group of prisoners who on one occasion refused to salute the Chinese flag. The torture resulting from such defiance left around twelve of Ngawang's fellow prisoners dead. Through a small hole in his solitary confinement cell he witnessed the murdered prisoners' bodies, stiff with rigor mortis, being carried away.
Tsewang displays the bullet wounds inflicted upon him. In March 2008 he was one of a crowd of unarmed Tibetans who took to the streets to protest the Chinese occupation of Tibet. When Chinese security forces opened fire into the crowd Tsewang ran to aid a Buddhist monk who had been shot. As he tried to carry the fallen monk to safety two bullets ripped through his body, penetrating his kidney and shattering his left arm. Rescued by friends, Tsewang hid in the mountains for fourteen months without medical treatment before having the strength to escape to India. Upon his arrival in India doctors advised amputation of his now useless left arm, but Tsewang refused, vowing to keep it as evidence of the suffering that had been forced upon him.