Homecoming

These images were taken inside a small portrait studio in Xiahe, a small village-monastery situated in the highlands of Gansu Province in Northwest China. Originally the town was part of Tibet and known as Labrang until China's Cultural Revolution in the 1950s when most of the largely Tibetan population were either forced to leave their homes or murdered. In the population vacuum created, Government policy encouraged Han Chinese to re-settle the town.

Since the 1970s many of Labrang's original population have moved back home and today the town is now a combination of Tibetan, Han, and Hui Chinese. The town is also a thoroughfare for Buddhist pilgrims and backpacking Westerners who come to visit the Labrang monastery. Resentment between the three ethic groups is clearly present in the town and for a period in 2008 it was closed to tourists.

The local portrait studios provide a service for mainly Buddhist pilgrims who want something to remember their journey by. This particular studio had backgrounds of Potala Palace—the residence of the Dalai Lama until 1959. Today the Potala Palace has been converted into a museum by the Chinese and is advertised as a tourist attraction. Apart from the provision of souvenirs these amateur photo studios act as a kind of teleportation service where Tibetan pilgrims are reinstated into their spiritual and cultural homeland. These statements of belonging are bitter sweet in the sense that they are utopian visions of pride and belonging only achievable through the artifice of photography.