Fieldwork: A Photographer in Spiti

Patrick Sutherland has been documenting the culturally Tibetan community of Spiti in North India since 1993. This Professorial Platform will reflect upon twenty-four years of undertaking fieldwork in Spiti. In particular it will describe the evolution of this ongoing documentary project. It will also depict the essential messiness of photographic practices that embrace the randomness of unforeseen encounters. Such encounters in Sutherland’s fieldwork have generated challenges to the nature and status of his documentary photographs and triggered the development of distinct phases of the project. The lecture will reveal a number of interlinked themes emerging from Sutherland’s obsessive relationship with a community that is undergoing rapid social change, themes that a very long term perspective bring into sharper relief