NORLHA IN BLACK AND WHITE

By the mid 80’s I didn’t have time to spend hours on each print and the darkroom became a storage room. Then came digital photography that could deliver anything with Photoshop. The Rolleiflex got passed on to Noryang who used it in college then quietly relegated it to a shelf in Dechen’s Norlha office.

Last year, the gang of children that hang around the office after work came out brandishing a disemboweled 120 format film. A photographer had left a box the previous year and, in the digital age, no one knew what it was for. I brought out the Rolleiflex, still loaded with a film begun by Noryang six years before, and took a few rolls.

All the black in white pictures in this series are real; the oldest is from the Gribonow Archive, a scene of Ritoma from the late 20’s. It was recognized as such thanks to the unmistakable landmark of seemingly tumbling stones that stand just a few meters from where we built the workshop nearly 100 years later with the monastery in the background. One is of Noryang using it, others are scenes of a Norlha picnic around 2009, and the rest, I took last year. The two color ones are of us using the camera as a prop in a shoot and of me cradling it in Rangoon in 1971.

Strange seeing a herd of yaks in Black and White….