An exhibition of work by the AHRC-funded photographer, Patrick Sutherland, is on show at the Long Gallery, Pitt Rivers Museum – despite the photographs originally being dismissed and thrown away to burn on the fire.

Disciples of a Crazy Saint: The Buchen of Spiti is an exhibition of work taken over several years and several visits to the Spiti Valley – a remote area in Himalayan North India where the Buchen people live.

The Buchen of Spiti are ritual experts and actors, disciples of the fifteenth-century “crazy saint” Thang Tong Gyalpo. They are most famous for performing the ‘Ceremony of Breaking the Stone’, an elaborate exorcism ritual described by the tibetologist George de Roerich in the 1930s – which is still practiced by Buchen today.

Buchen also enact a local form of the Tibetan Opera – Buddhist morality plays, delivered for the edification of village audiences, illustrating karmic principles through the dramatised biographies of Tibetan saints. The stage also offers a space for uninhibited speech and earthy humour, where even the most harrowing stories can have comic interludes.

Patrick Sutherland visited Spiti several times in order to join the Buchen on tour. He photographed their plays, the behind the scenes preparations, and the audiences. He says, “I wanted to capture the flavour and feel of the Buchen performances and the valued social role they play, as honoured guests within their host villages.”

However, when Patrick recently gave back some of these images to the Buchen, one Buchen boldly told him that his photographs were so awful that they had torn them up and thrown them in the fire.  “Even allowing for the Buchen propensity for joking this seemed an extraordinary response, and became the stimulus for this project” Sutherland recalls.

Support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, allowed Sutherland to take the archive of his images of the Buchen taken over the last decade, as well as historical material, with the view to negotiating a form of documentation that had value to both the Buchen and to Sutherland himself.

Patrick explains, “In discussions, one Buchen, Sangey Gatuk, contrasted my unposed black and white reportage images with the colour portraits that villagers have in their albums and on their walls.

The latter are much more formalised encounters, which have the privileged status of uncommon events in a community where ownership of a camera has, until recently, been extremely rare. For the Buchen, these images visually manifest pride in their identity.

Much of what I had photographed they viewed as superficial. Buchen denigrate their improvised performances, the locally specific, unique, unwritten and intangible elements of Buchen theatre. They dismiss all this as mere entertainment, the filler between what is important – the stories as described in the written texts.”

The form that this exhibition has eventually  taken, juxtaposing portraits and images of Buchen with details of thanka paintings, has emerged from a process of collaboration with the Buchen themselves, incorporating their own ideas about how to produce and present a visual record of their theatre, rituals and social role.

Disciples of a Crazy Saint: The Buchen of Spiti, is on display until July 2011. For more information you can download the exhibition flyer from the museum website (pdf).

Ends

Notes to editors
 
Media Contact: Emi Spinner, AHRC Communications Officer; T: 01793 41 6020,  E: e.spinner@ahrc.ac.uk   
 
Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC): Each year the AHRC provides approximately £112 million from the Government to support research and postgraduate study in the arts and humanities, from languages and law, archaeology and English literature to design and creative and performing arts. In any one year, the AHRC makes approximately 700 research awards and around 1,350 postgraduate awards. Awards are made after a rigorous peer review process, to ensure that only applications of the highest quality are funded. The quality and range of research supported by this investment of public funds not only provides social and cultural benefits but also contributes to the economic success of the UK.