Tibetan visual history 1920-1950: an online resource

The Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum together hold extraordinarily rich, and overlapping, collections of over 6,000 historical photographs of Tibet taken between 1920 and 1950. Conceived by their photographers as a unified visual resource, the photographs chart a crucial period in Tibetan history and in Anglo-Tibetan relations. More importantly the photographs constitute a vital record of Tibetan culture destroyed since the Chinese occupation. The aim of the project is that by bringing these two key collections together, to develop and deliver a high quality, research level on-line resource for Tibetan history and culture and an associated digital archive. The photographs are being fully identified, catalogued, scanned and made available as a fully searchable, multi-layered and interactive ‘living’ resource. The objective is to provide not only a ‘typical’ image database but a ‘living’ multi-faceted facility. Users will be able to explore not only the content of photographs, but their contexts and history of imaging Tibet. As a dynamic, interactive resource, it aims to encourage new ways of thinking historically with photographs. Thus the output aims not only to give access but make it possible for the user to put material together in previously unimagined ways, allowing them to build their own interpretations within the resource. The interface design will address different scholarly, professional and public needs and aims also to provide entry points from Tibetan perspectives rather than merely reproduce a Western museum structure. In so doing we hope to be able to address assumption about the nature of visual history more broadly, encouraging new ways of thinking about visual history.