© Sheila Rock, Movement 1, 2002
PHOTOKUNST Fasanenstr. 69 10719 Berlin Allemagne
In 1970 exiled Tibetan Monks founded the Buddhist monastery, Sera, in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. This monastery furthers the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of one of the "Three Great Monasteries," Sera in Lhasa, the five-hundred-year monastery now under Chinese control. This exiled monastery is a place of shared learning and a place of philosophical and religious debate. It is a place where the highest academic graduates of the monastic university will grow. Monks will study the Buddhist teachings and texts here for nearly twenty years.
In stunning imagery the American photographer Sheila Rock captures the asceticism and the deep spiritual life within this world. She captures the sense of community, the precise routine of song and prayer as well as moments at play. Rock's austere photographs give us a most unique insight into the monastic daily life with monks at work on handcrafts or meditating in their sparsely furnished bedrooms. The deliberate absence of color photography lends additional intensity to these images. Rock uses light to frame intimate spaces, to model forms, and to accent looks and gestures. She photographs some monks before neutral backgrounds, as she has in her portraits of famous singers and musicians. The simplicity of these compositions reduces the image to the expressive languages of clothes and faces: faces that are not easily forgotten, the seriousness of children's faces deep in reflection, subdued and concentrating faces of young men, and the cheerful serenity of the old.
Sheila Rock's photographs reveal the great strength drawn from an experience of displacement and loss of homeland. She shows people who have traveled a long way in search of a higher wisdom. This photography's art is stirring. It moves us even into an encounter with ourselves, seeing a beauty within simplicity which we may no longer even recognize.