New York, 1992, 1st edition. 223 pp, 200 b/w photos. Large format hardcover with dust jacket. The spine of the DJ has changed color (to green!), otherwise the book is Like New.
This book is SIGNED by both Heinrich Harrer and The Dalai Lama.
A marvelous selection of the images of daily life in the Tibetan capital in its last years of freedom. Also includes an anecdotal account of Harrer's years in Tibet. In the 1940s, Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer escaped from a British internment camp in India and walked across the Himalayas.
He limped into Lhasa two years later, and spent five years there as an honorary Tibetan. He kept diaries, bartered for an old Leica camera, and took thousands of pictures. Then in 1950 the Chinese invaded Tibet and Harrer fled. Seven Years in Tibet tells that story, but Harrer wanted to do more to raise international awareness.
The result is Lost Lhasa, a collection of hundreds of previously unpublished intimate photographs of the Lhasa that used to be. With an explanatory text written in the same unpretentious prose that made Seven Years so popular, this paean to the Lhasa Harrer knew is beautiful and irreplaceable.
This collection of 200 photos and thematically ordered essays conjures up life in an isolated, innocent Tibet before the Chinese invasion of the 1950s. Though he presents himself humbly, Harrer (author of the 1953 classic Seven Years in Tibet) is clearly remarkable: a celebrated Austrian mountaineer who escaped a British prison camp to enter Tibet in 1944, he learned the language, developed a friendship with the Dalai Lama (then a teenager), worked on the country's reforestation and helped build Lhasa's sewer system.
His black-and-white photos, though occasionally grainy or mundane, capture the uncommon tapestry of Tibet: hatted servants leading the horses of government ministers, the Dalai Lama's formidable but kind mother, two honorees at a New Year's celebration clad in huge fur caps and Russian brocade robes. Harrer's photos are complemented by brief essays on such aspects of Tibetan culture as its penchant for irreverent street songs; its pilgrims' arduous rites; and its appreciation of the national drink, butter tea, which purportedly replenishes the body's stores of salt, fat and water.
