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John Claude White was a civil engineer by education, a colonial administrator by profession, and a photographer by vocation. His photographs of the Himalayas were taken from 1883-1908. He worked for a year as an engineer at the British Residency in Kathmandu and spent twenty-one years based in Gangtok, Sikkim as the first British political officer overseeing the British interests in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet.
Wherever he travelled, he photographed the world around him: panoramas of the vast Tibetan landscape; mountains and glaciers of Sikkim; portraits of the royal court of the king of Bhutan; the monks and monasteries of Lhasa. Mules followed him on the rugged mountain trails bearing his photographic equipment, and ensuring that the fragile glass plates survived the long return trip south intact, to be printed by the Johnston and Hoffman photography studio.
White spent his entire professional life working for the British Raj. In 1909 he retired to England, where he published his memoirs Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier 1887-1908. This book is a tribute to this extraordinary photographer.
Kurt Meyer was born in Z��h, Switzerland and received his architectural degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH). He practiced architecture in the US for 40 years and received many awards. He is a Fellow Emeritus of the American Institute of Architects. For over twenty-five years he has been a Himalayan explorer and collector of rare books on Central Asia and the Himalayan countries.
Meyer first travelled to the Himalayas in the 1970s, with his wife Pamela Deuel and lived in Nepal for a decade where they researched the life of John Claude White as well as the art and culture of the artistic Tharu people of Nepal. Together they have published two books on the Tharu region. ISBN: 8188204250
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