For Canadian photographer Brian Harris, it’s all about sight.
Harris’ multimedia show “Himalayan Visions & Tibetan Voices” opens on Thursday at the McDonald Theatre. He brings images of a foreign land to his audiences and in turn brings sight to those in need.
The showing will consist of Harris’ photographs of the Tibetan people, culture and environment, the result of numerous trips he’s taken since 1987. This visual display will be interwoven with oral histories and music.
The show isn’t just an opportunity for him to display his work, however. It also helps to raise funds for Seva (which means “service” in Sanskrit), an organization that fights blindness and provides vision restoration surgeries in Tibet, as well as in Nepal and India.
Harris — a practicing Buddhist with a calm and even tone of voice — said the project is a natural extension of his interests. His transformation from wandering traveler to media producer was a natural progression of his desire to aid those he saw in his travels. After Harris returned from Tibet for the first time, he decided to do a series of art shows displaying his photographs.
“It was a very grassroots process,” Harris said. “I did the art shows, and that was really quite successful, so I decided to turn it into a book. As it turned out the publisher of that book was one of the largest producers of calendars, so that was one of the main ways of fundraising for the organization for many years.”
Harris said his goals for the traveling show are to increase awareness about Tibetan culture and give people a different level of interaction than a gallery showing could provide.
“There’s a certain kind of level of personal interaction that you get in the show that you don’t get from just photographs,” he said. After two years off to raise funds and develop concepts, Harris took the show on the road.
He said Tibet has garnered a lot of media attention in recent years, and he noted the unremitting push of modernity into the lives of the Tibetans. According to Harris, it was culture that existed for hundreds of years without very little external influence, and as a result of exposure to other cultures, most of that society’s traditions are now vanishing.
“In some ways, it’s a kind of cultural death. Every year I go back, it gets harder to document that culture because it’s disappearing, but you can’t be negative about it,” he said. “People in this part of the world are just like the people in our part of the world — they change. But I’m not a romantic; I don’t think that we should try to stop it, and I don’t think that we could stop it.”
The oral tradition, once an integral part of the Tibetan culture, is also disappearing, leaving many stories lost forever. Although photography takes center stage, Harris said he enjoys working to preserve these oral histories.
“Just working on the collecting of memoirs, getting to travel around and collect the stories of these men and women who are in their 60s and 70s, who were farmers and nomads, that is really fulfilling to me,” he said.
Harris didn’t credit any particular photographer as influencing him, but rather a school of writers he called “the traditionalists,” including American author Houston Smithand Marco Pallis.
“If you look at the pictures I take, you get this impression of the cultural traditions, but it’s very hard to get those images today,” he said.
Tickets for the show are $10, and available at the McDonald Theatre box office and REI, located at 306 Lawrence St. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the show begins at 7:30 p.m.