John Claude White (1853-1918) was a civil engineer by education, a colonial administrator by profession, and a photographer by vocation. His photographs of the Himalayas were taken from 1883-1908. He spent twenty-one years based in Gangtok, Sikkim as the first British political officer overseeing the British interests in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Wherever he traveled, he photographed the world around him: panoramas of the vast Tibetan landscape; mountains and glaciers of Sikkim; portraits of the royal court of the King of Bhutan; the monks and monasteries of Lhasa. Mules followed him on the rugged mountain trails bearing his photographic equipment, and ensuring that the fragile glass plates survived the long return trip south intact, to be printed by the Johnston and Hoffman photography studio. White spent his entire professional life working for the British Raj. In 1909 he retired to England, where he published his memoirs. This book is a tribute to this extraordinary photographer.

In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim: A Photographic Record by John Claude White 1883-1908, Kurt Meyer & Pamela Deuel Meyer, Mapin Publishing, Hardcover, 190 Pages, 2005, $65.00

Kurt Meyer is a Fellow Emeritus of the American Institute of Architects. Meyer first travelled to the Himalayas in the 1970s, with his wife Pamela Deuel Meyer and lived in Nepal for a decade where they researched the life of John Claude White as well as the art and culture of the artistic Tharu people of Nepal. Together they have published two books on the Tharu region.