The Dalai Lama Up Close

About 20 years ago, when the Swiss photojournalist Manuel Bauer presented a dummy copy of his photo-book on the Dalai Lama to the spiritual leader, he felt a slight anxiety. Bauer had agreed to show his book, which contained hundreds of pictures of the Dalai Lama taken over several years, before publishing it. But while he didn’t think the Dalai Lama would object to any photo, he wondered if the spiritual leader would go through the book. “I mean, knowing him, he would have just set it aside and asked how I was. And that would be great because it meant he trusted me, but it would also be disappointing [to not have the Dalai Lama look at my photographs],” Bauer recalls today.

Instead, to Bauer’s surprise, the Dalai Lama sat with the book and began to flip through the pages intently. Almost an hour passed. The Dalai Lama did not object to any of the photos, not even to those that depicted private moments such as those of him praying or meditating before daybreak, sometimes not even fully dressed. Everything was going fine, until the Dalai Lama chanced upon a photo of his with another senior monk – Rizong Rinpoche – going through an ancient Buddhist text at his residence. “He said he could not let that picture go,” Bauer recalls. The objection was over the level at which the two sat. In the photo it appeared that the Dalai Lama was sitting at a slightly higher level than his companion. And while it is customary to have the Dalai Lama sit higher than everyone else in a room, in that moment, the Dalai Lama explained, it was Rizong Rinpoche who was reciting a 5th century text by the Buddhist thinker Arya Asanga to him, effectively making Rizong Rinpoche his tutor. “So although he is the Dalai Lama, he was saying he could not sit at a level higher than him,” Bauer says.

The Dalai Lama wasn’t sitting at a higher level. It was an illusion created by the angle from which the photograph had been taken. But suspecting one of his aides might have secretly increased the height of his cushions, Bauer watched with what must have been amusement, as the Dalai Lama took a measuring tape to the cushions. It was only after the tape confirmed that the cushions were of the same height that the Dalai Lama withdrew his objection.

Bauer brings up this moment as he discusses his latest photo-book on the spiritual leader titled  Dalai Lama. To him, it is yet another reminder of the spiritual leader’s humility. “I mean he is the Dalai Lama. But he was concerned that Rizong Rinpoche was getting the required respect,” Bauer says.

Bauer has been known for and highly regarded for the years he has spent photographing the Dalai Lama. Now he brings together a lifetime’s work – from 1990 to 2024 – in this new book. Through a total of 235 photos (and interspersed with texts by the Dalai Lama’s principal translator Thupten Jinpa) Bauer takes us from the intimate and private quarters of the Dalai Lama’s life – like him meditating alone in a hotel room before daybreak, sometimes dressed in just a vest, or eating a bowl of muesli while going over texts – to very public spaces, where he encounters and addresses massive crowds.

Tenzin Gyatso, known more commonly to the world as the 14th Dalai Lama, remains one of the most enigmatic figures from the last century. How does he win over the world with little more than charm and a message of peace? And what of the many facets of his personality, his openness to science and other belief systems; or his ease with people, whether world leaders or scientists, or someone to whom he is close to a living god? Bauer understands these questions and his book takes us into many of these aspects of his personality.

Bauer first met the Dalai Lama when he came to Dharamshala on an assignment to photograph the Tibetan exile community. This would kick-start a life-long interest in the Dalai Lama and the fate of the Tibetan community. Bauer identifies himself with the tradition of ‘concerned photojournalism’, a phrase said to have been coined by the Hungarian-American photographer Cornell Capa, where the impulse is not merely to record something, but to educate and change the world through one’s photographs. Bauer in fact took his interest in Tibet to what many would consider dangerous limits, when in the mid-1990s, he accompanied a six-year-old girl, Yangdol, and her father, as they escaped Tibet through the Himalayas to Nepal and then to India on foot. The pictures from that journey brought much attention to the dangers Tibetans were taking upon themselves to flee their homeland.

 

When Bauer first met the Dalai Lama in 1990, international fame was only just beginning to catch up. The Dalai Lama had won the Nobel Peace Prize just three months before. A few years after he began taking his pictures, Bauer realised how vital it was that there should be a photographic archive of the Dalai Lama. “All we had then were pictures of the Dalai Lama smiling and waving from the stage. We needed to create a more comprehensive archive, a historical record,” Bauer says.

Bauer wanted to help create a record that didn’t just document the Dalai Lama’s life but one that also drew out his persona. This meant an intensive deep dive, shadowing the Dalai Lama through the world, and into his most private moments, sometimes just as he arose from bed or prepared to sleep. When Bauer pitched the idea, the Dalai Lama was more than welcoming. “He said, ‘No problem. You can even sleep in the same room,” Bauer says with a laugh. “I didn’t take up the offer. But I managed without it.” Bauer became something of the Dalai Lama’s ‘official photographer’, as he pursued the spiritual leader through the world. This was of course an expensive endeavour and Bauer would occasionally take up freelance assignments to fund his project.

Many of Bauer’s photographs capture moments very few would otherwise be privy to. One such moment is of the Dalai Lama exercising on a treadmill. Back in 2004, the Dalai Lama had reluctantly given in to his physicians’ entreaties to offset the many hours he spent meditating by exercising on a treadmill. But the Dalai Lama is believed to have disliked the experience, considering the time spent on the machine a waste of his time. “The body I guess isn’t of very high priority in the Buddhist school of thought,” Bauer says. But a solution soon arrived when the Dalai Lama realised that he could pray simultaneously while working out.

Asked to choose a favourite among his photos, Bauer declines to answer it. But he points to a series of images at the end of the book. These are black and white photographs of the Dalai Lama’s face while deep in meditation. These are stark images, eyes and mouth closed, of a face closed to the world and turned inward. “In the past, when I would take pictures like this, I would do things like photograph the Dalai Lama’s face from between objects, or give some kind of layer. But I have come to realise that sometimes these kinds of pictures, where you are not trying to do too much are the best,” Bauer says. “Sometimes the best photos are the ones you take simply.”

booksBuddhismDharamshalaManuel Bauerphotographsspiritual leaderSwiss photographerThe Dalai Lama