Mustang, Nepal, is known for its vibrant landscapes -- blue skies, vermillion-colored cliffs, fluted canyons of deep ochre. It is a tapestry of Himalayan culture and history, a social and economic crossroads for trade, tourism, and Tibetan tradition. Today, the people of Mustang are navigating significant transformations: from the impacts of climate change across this rain shadow landscape to the lived effects of outmigration on communities who have relied for centuries on agriculture, pastoralism, and their role as culture brokers between the Tibetan plateau and Hindu South Asia.
Mustang in Black and White captures this area's elemental qualities, revealing the enduring cultural foundations and shifting daily rhythms of Himalayan village life. Kevin Bubriski's masterful black-and-white portraits of this place and its people are coupled with Sienna Craig's thick descriptions of what is, and is not, seen through the eye of the camera. Against the grain of glossy, idealized images of Tibetan and Himalayan lifeworlds, Mustang in Black and White illuminates the quotidian beauty and cultural complexity of this region.
Much has been philosophized about black and white. It was Eugene Smith (1918-1978) who commenced this working style in a powerful way... Kevin Bubriski shares this sensibility with Smith... It is all about marking places. - Niels Gutschow
In the Indigenous Tibetan world-view, creation does not arise from a void; it happens at the margins, and the ultimate margin is the meeting place of light and dark, the boundary of being and non-being, a quality that is so keenly captured throughout this book... Sometimes, darkness is the best place in which to see the cosmos in its full radiance. - Charles Ramble
Mustang in Black and White, Sienna Craig (Author), Kevin Bubriski (Photographer), Vajra Books, Hardcover, 2018, 151 pages, $55.00
Sienna Craig was born in Santa Barbara, California in 1973. She is the author of a children's book, Clear Sky, Red Earth: A Himalayan Story and A Sacred Geography: Sonnets of the Himalaya and Tibet. She earned her PhD in anthropology from Cornell University and is currently an assistant professor at Dartmouth College. She lives in Vermont with her husband Ken and her daughter Aida.
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