Rato Monk, photographer talks on his latest photographs

Rato Monk and photographer Nicholas Vreeland gets talking about his latest series of photographs.

Could you tell us about the series that you have showcased in Tasveer?
Photos for Rato is a series of photographs chosen from the many I have taken over the 26 years I’ve been a monk at Rato Dratsang. 

When I first arrived at the monastery in Mundgod, in northern Karnataka in early 1985, we were twelve monks. Over the years many new monks arrived from Tibet as well as from Ladakh, Sikkim, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Nepal, and Bhutan.  We soon had over 100 monks and needed monks’ rooms, a temple that we could all fit into, a kitchen and dining area, and administrative facilities.

To raise the funds to pay for this somefriends of mine suggested that we sell photographs I’ve taken.  I was asked to edit my many pictures down to 50 or 60 from which this series of 20 was chosen by Robert Delpire, the editor and publisher of Henri Cartier-Bresson.  The exhibition has traveled from New York to Paris, to Genoa, to Rome, to Chicago, to Milan, to New Delhi, to Naples, to Berlin, and now to Bangalore, a city I’m very fond of. 

What was the biggest inspiration behind the series?
When photographing, I try to simply take pictures. I’m not trying to tell a story or to document something. And so there isn’t much inspiration involved in the taking of the pictures. I do apply myself to composing, to creating an image that will have a certain structural integrity, harmony, balance, and the like.

There are times when I see an image before me very clearly. I simply lift my camera to my eye, set the light, focus, and click. Often, after looking carefully, I realise that I won’t be able to make a strong image out of what I see, and I walk on.  In terms of this set of photographs, I chose images taken in or around the monastery.

I wanted the series to reflect what I see around me while leading my life. I feel that we will best convey the essence of something if it is close to us. Photographs of our own home and environment, though more difficult to take, will be more revealing.

Tell us about the days you’ve spent in India and with Dalai Lama?
I have spent many years in India as a Buddhist monk in a monastery. Rato Dratsang is a monastic university with a strict curriculum of study and debate which I’ve participated in. I try to attend important teachings bestowed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It is very rare to have the opportunity to consult His Holiness privately.

I photographed His Holiness the Dalai Lama during a visit he made to Rato Dratsang in 2002. I had requested permission to do a portrait of His Holiness and had prepared myself by going the day before to the spot where I planned to take the photograph.

When it came time to photograph His Holiness there were hundreds of people around. The police had to push people back and keep other photographers from stepping in front of my tripod.

His Holiness remained concentrated on the lens of my camera, and the photograph in the exhibition is the first exposure I took.

When was your first foray in Buddhism?
I was first introduced to Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhist culture during a visit to India, Sikkim, Bhutan, and Nepal in 1972. A few years later, in New York, I met a Tibetan lama called Khyongla Rato Rinpoche, with whom I began seriously studying. I eventually joined his monastery, and am still studying with him today.