The voices of the Chinese border patrol bounced around the high mountain terrain, seeming to come from all directions at once. They were close now. Lhamo Kyab hid between two snow covered boulders. If he were captured now he would only be spared further months of imprisonment and torture if the border guards were to shoot him, dumping his corpse in a crevasse where it would likely never be found. He focused his mind on his wife and children who he had not seen in more than four years; four years of darkness, fear and pain, all for carrying the banned Tibetan national flag.
Lhamo's eyes burned. The swollen skin on his fingers was beginning to turn black, the pain was incredible. He had walked for weeks through bitter Himalayan nights to reach the border. Now that his family were waiting for him only days away in India, he could not bear the thought of being re-captured. Silently, he prayed.
Lhamo Kyab made it safely to his family. Many Tibetans do not.
I have spent most of the last two years living within the exiled Tibetan community in India, and during this time I have heard Tibetans' accounts of life under Chinese rule, and their journeys to escape oppression. They have showed me scars, photographs of young friends they watched killed by Chinese bullets, and told of families they may never see again. These are not stories from decades ago, but fresh, visceral memories of recent events, stories that cannot be told in Tibet under the watchful eye of the Chinese Communist Party. I began this project, called Fresh Memories, to tell these stories.
This project consists of two aspects. The first is the stories carried into exile by each refugee I photograph told to me during interviews and combined with their portraits. The second aspect is a documentation of the borderlands through which the refugees must pass to reach exile. The Tibetan border appears beautiful, but its valleys conceal Chinese military bases, its hills hold secrets of human rights abuses, and its crevasses hide the bodies of both the lost and the murdered.
Tibet is a land or secrecy, paranoia and oppression. Since 2009 around a hundred Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule in Tibet. Images of burning bodies are testament to Tibetans passion for greater freedoms, but if we really wish to know why people go to such extreme lengths to protest then we must ask Tibetans about their lives.
I believe that if there is to be a resolution of the situation in Tibet then the stories which these refugees carry with them must be told. The Fotovisura Grant will enable me to return to the Himalayas to complete this project, and create a document of what it is like to live in a Tibet under Chinese rule.
"The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface." Howard Zinn
