August 14 – September 14, 2018
Exiled children of Tibet
Photo Exhibition by Photographer Tsering Topgyal
Tibet Open House, Školská 28, Prague
Tsering Topgyal is an award winning Tibetan photographer based in India. Formerly a photographer at the Associated Press in New Delhi, Tsering now works as a freelancer. His photographs have been published in many leading international newspapers, magazines and websites including the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Guardian.
Born in Tibet, Tsering went into exile at the age of 8 crossing the Himalayas on foot. He grew up at the Tibetan Children’s Village, a boarding school in Dharamsala, North India, set up to take care of Tibetan refugee children. In an interview with the NY Times, Tsering says, “The great tragedy of my life is not being separated from my family, but being separated from the sensibility of missing them after living without them for decades.” There are currently about 200,000 Tibetans living in exile in many countries across the world including in India, Nepal, Bhutan, USA, Canada, Switzerland and other European countries.
As a young photographer, Tsering started taking pictures of other young Tibetan exiles who had been separated from their parents as a way of sorting out his own experiences but in the process he discovered something more in his images – a way to show the world the difficulties of living and surviving as a Tibetan in exile. Tsering was uniquely situated to document exactly this.
In this exhibition, titled, Exiled children of Tibet, Tsering presents a unique and powerful series of original photographs of his schoolmates and others who’ve been smuggled out of Tibet at an early age.
