Pilgrims of Mount Kailash - Tibet

Samuel Zuder | Face to Faith | Mount Kailash | Tibet In the midst of the stony desert of the Changtang plateau, it towers up like a pyramid: the Mt. Kailash (Sanskrit: kelasa -“Crystal”) or “Kang Rinpoche” (“jewel of snow”) as the Tibetans call it. The four religions of Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Böns not only worship the most remote and difficult to access Kailash as holy mountain but also as the origin of the universe, as the hub of the world. Year after year, hundreds of believers set out for the exhausting pilgrimage to the Kailash and they circumambulate the mountain on a 54 kilometers long path – the so-called Kora. Out of respect for its spiritual importance the Mt. Kailash has never been climbed. Reinhold Messner declined the opportunity to climb the mountain in the 1980s. Mount Kailash is one of the rare untrodden places of our world. Foreigners only get permit to visit the Kailash area in officially organized tourist groups and only for a couple of days. In summer 2012 I luckily got the opportunity to stay there for several weeks. So after years of planning I finally started this project about the pilgrimage to the holy Mt. Kailash. The pilgrims approach reverently, they walk around it with stoic patience and firmly believing in the power that shall come from Mount Kailash. I wanted to show the same respect to the pilgrims and to the Mountain Kailash which means so much to them. The pilgrims should step in front of the camera like they had been on their way at the Kailash, preferably without corrections to the clothes and without visible reaction to the camera, an analog 4”x 5” camera. A series of iconic portraits came to life, which underlines the typical and the individual in the appearance of the Kailash pilgrim at the same time. On the one hand, we look into faces of humility, modesty and without vanity and on the other hand, we see self-confident, independent personalities with a distinctive stylistic consciousness.