The Tibetans: Photographs [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

(Headline: Photography book award, by Finbarr O'Reilly, National Post)

Vancouver-based photographer Art Perry has won the second Roloff Beny Photography Book Award for The Tibetans. The country's top photography book award, presented last night in Toronto, earns Perry a cash prize of $30,000. His American publisher, Viking Studio/Penguin Putnam, also gets $20,000, while two runners-up, Courtney Milne and Linda Rutenberg, get $5,000 each. Perry, who is a lecturer at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, spent five years travelling throughout Tibet and the exiled Tibetan communities in India and Nepal, documenting with a camera the people he met along the way - monks, nomads, city dwellers. Through the Dalai Lama, Perry gained access to seldom-visited monasteries in remote regions where he captured a traditional way of life that is being threatened by the Chinese occupation of Tibet. In a current project, the Ottawa-born Perry has been documenting in both writing and photographs the fractured cultures of Northern and Southern Ireland. The project, which he began in 1998, is a lifelong dream of Perry, whose family is from Belfast. The award was created in memory of Roloff Beny, a world-renowned photographer who was born in Medicine Hat, Alta., and is intended to encourage excellence in photograph publishing.

(Headline:"Turning the spotlight on photography books," by Martin Levin.) For many years, B.C. writer and photographer Art Perry has documented threatened cultures, including the Nubians and the Mayans. Here he turns his attention, and his fine black-and-white photographic sensibility, on Tibetans, the world's most famous enigmatic people. Perry takes us to remote monasteries, up the Chang Tang Plateau and to the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal. The whole conveys a powerful sense of meaning - and loss.

'Tibetan images snag major prize for local photographer' by Michael Scott, Sun Visual Art Critic

Vancouver photographer Art Perry has won a major international award for his large-format photographic book The Tibetans: Photographs. Perry, an instructor at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, becomes the second winner of the $30,000 Roloff Beny Photography Book Award at a ceremony in Toronto. (Magnum photographer Larry Towell received the first Beny Award for his book El Salvador.) The publisher of Perry's 1999 book, Viking Studio (an imprint of Penguin Books), will share in the award, receiving a $20,000 prize of its own. Perry spent five years collecting images of Buddhist societies in the Himalayas, working primarily in Tibet, but travelling also to Ladakh and Nepal. Last year, the Washington Post named his book one of the year's 10 best. A Vancouver Sun reviewer wrote: "Perry takes us from the slightly familiar markets and brothels of Lhasa clear through to the monasteries and mountaintops that have not been otherwise documented. The text is as clear-eyed as the pictures, but the message it contains is not entirely pretty. Though Buddhism practiced by the Tibetans will certainly endure, Tibetan Buddhist culture is very much under attack, perhaps by we western cultural imperialists, certainly by the country's Chinese occupiers. Read it, or just look at the pictures, and those Free Tibet bumper stickers will seem a lot more immediate." Here in Vancouver, Perry teaches a multi-disciplinary course at Emily Carr on the history of bohemianism - a course that covers film, punk rock and jazz as well as visual art. (I start by telling my students to stay up all night before coming to class," he jokes.) Perry also teaches a course in contemporary literature, a field that has sparked his interest in his own Irish roots. He says he will spend part of the Beny prize money on a sabbatical year in County Monaghan in northern Ireland. Perry plans to pursue both writing and photography during this time. "I have to say I am very, very honoured to be receiving this award," he says. "My father had some of Roloff Beny's big books and I grew up handling those incredible pages. There aren't people in those images, but they were lush and magnificent." Expatriate Canadian photographer Roloff Beny made an international name for himself in the 1970s and early 1980s chronicling a world of sensual beauty, with major large-format books on subjects such as pre-revolutionary Iran and Italy. He died in 1984.