The Lost Horizons of Fosco Maraini

T he traditional idea of exploration – projected by Hollywood, punctuated by novelists – is heavy on tweed and rucksacks, purpose and pluck. A recently discovered folio of photographs chronicling an expedition to Tibet in 1937, to be offered at Sotheby’s London, proves that it can also be a mystical experience.

The 97 silver prints, stylishly clothbound by a Tuscan bookbinder under the title A Glimpse of Tibet, are the work of the Italian explorer, author and photographer Fosco Maraini. In the 1930s and 1940s, this young Leica-primed polyglot participated in two expeditions over the Himalayas, adventures he later chronicled in his book Secret Tibet (1952). More than three quarters of a century after his first journey, this rare cache of unpublished photographs provide a window into a lost world.

Led by Giuseppe Tucci, a leading Orientalist of the period and a member of the Royal Academy of Italy, the 1937 expedition made its way up the monsoon-washed slopes of Sikkim – with their sopping ferns, leeches and mosquitoes – and on through the Tang Himalayan pass, across the bleak high plateaus to the Nyang Chu Valley where they arrived at the imposing 14th century fortress at Gyantse. From there they continued to Lhasa.

Maraini describes Tibet as “a kingdom of the sky and the sun… a glorious symbol of the most crystalline rationality, of serene and harmonious thought.” And, he ponders, “will not the interior life of the inhabitants of such a country resemble the nature that surrounds them?” Not entirely. All human life was present in this striking terrain.

He notices how a sullen lama “betrayed a long-standing, bitter grudge against life.” Other characters display elegance and innocence, not least the studious children with their scrolls and the women tending the fields of barley and their looms. Maraini’s lens, like his pen, does not romanticise, but it frames plenty that is beautiful in its simplicity. “There is a drowsiness in the air,” he noted.

Writing to Maraini about Secret Tibet, the American art historian Bernard Berenson noted: “I was there with you when you talked to Tibetans, lay and ecclesiastical, mystics, scholars, theologians, minstrels, shopkeepers, beggars, artisans and artists, proletarian priests and monks, peasants and shepherds.” Indeed, Maraini had a truly democratic eye.

His images also display an artistic understanding of composition – mountain ranges morph into startling abstract arrangements, monks appear like matinee idols. “At times a spear of light beating through the darkness of the temple discloses faces and figures as if one stood before apparitions,” he wrote about one dusty sanctuary. He caught intriguing details from another era: banknotes printed from woodcuts, tea stalls in the marketplace, paper prayer flags rustling their benediction in the wind.

But his objective was ethnographic. There is a curiosity for a culture largely hidden from the outside world: the monasteries and libraries, the culinary and musical traditions, the block-like functionalist buildings and the intricate costumes and crafts. These images are as educative as they are creative.

Maraini claimed that Tibet’s character was shaped by three things: butter, bones and silence. The butter was the product of the ubiquitous yaks. The bones were the sun-bleached remains of those animals, which peppered the landscape and were regarded as “a flower, a decoration, a comfort”. And then there was the silence which “dries the butter, pulverises the bones and leaves in the mind an inexpressible, dreamy sweetness.”

But, while Maraini was looking at the Tibetans they were also looking at him. “To them we represent the exotic in reverse – the exotic of aeroplanes, cameras, clocks, penicillin, a world of controllable, repeatable miracles,” he observed. The extraordinary collection of faces, vistas and scenes cocooned in this remarkable photobook fixes the meeting of two domains, the ancient and the modern, for a generation that can hardly fathom an existence of such hardship and serenity.

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Travel, Atlases, Maps and Natural History

12 November 2019 | 10:00 AM GMT | London