An exhibition of photographs of Buddhist Asia is revived in Edinburgh this September
Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait ran at the British Museum from 24 May to 31 July 1989. Photos © Audrey Harrison.
An exhibition of photographs taken by Graham Harrison that was first shown at the British Museum in 1989, opens in Scotland on September 12th, thanks to the efforts of an enterprising lecturer from Edinburgh University.
In May 1989 a line of posters went up on the railings in front of the British Museum in London to advertise what may have been the first photographic exhibition ever held at the museum. Called Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait, the exhibition accompanied the publication by the museum of Living Buddhism, a hardback book that described in words and pictures the living culture of a world religion.
Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait remained on show, within the roll of a prayer mat of the Oxus Treasure, on the museum’s upper level for two months. It then embarked on a tour of England under the auspices of the museum’s Education Department before coming to rest in the mid 1990s in a museum repository in West London.
And that’s where the exhibition stayed, prints, frames, panels and all, until Ian Astley, an enterprising senior lecturer from Edinburgh University, brought about a revival by securing funding to transport the whole enterprise to Scotland and organising for the exhibition to be shown again, with a new title.
Living Buddhism in Retrospect and Prospect, A Photographic Exhibition and Related Events, opens in the Foyer of the Main Library at the University of Edinburgh on 12th September 2011, with a special day of events on Thursday the 15th. Augmenting the original photographs by Graham Harrison will be some more recent images taken in Korea and Japan by Dr Astley.
Also on 15th September will be a talk by scholar Ian Reader on the economic and pastoral crisis in Japanese Buddhism, and a showing, for the first time in Scotland, of KanZeOn (2011) a film by Neil Cantwell and Tim Grabham.
Graham Harrison’s original photographs of Buddhist Asia were commissioned by the British Museum to accompany Buddhism: Art and Faith, a major exhibition of Buddhist artefacts held at the museum in 1985. Like the exhibition, the book uses images from that first commission and from a second commission in 1987 from the British Museum Press. Some photographs taken in South Korea for The Telegraph Sunday Magazine in 1983 are also used in both exhibition and book.
Published in hardback and paperback the book Living Buddhism by Andrew Powell with photographs by Graham Harrison, sold 26,700 copies in Britain and North America. A Spanish language edition, Budismo Vivo, sold a further 3,200 copies in Spain and Latin America.
Celia Clear, Managing Editor of the British Museum Press, whose leap of faith made possible the transposition of Harrison’s travels into book form, left the British Museum to steer Tate Enterprises through an extraordinary period of innovation.
Two people directly involved in the exhibition Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait in 1989, John Reeve, then head of Education at the British Museum, and his colleague Simon James, are now, respectively, Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of London and Reader at the University of Durham. Dr James has chosen 2011 as an opportune time to begin a two-year sabbatical to study the Roman military base at Dura-Europos, Syria.
Kodak Ltd., sponsors of the exhibition in England, faces continuing uncertainty after two decades of dramatic change in the photographic industry.
And Andrew Powell, the book’s author and Harrison’s companion on his second Buddhist journey, moved to Connecticut in 2003. Powell is now the Editor-in-Chief of an American publishing company specializing in travel. His work takes him back to the Far East two or three times a year and he has watched the revival of religion in China with interest.
Now let’s return briefly to May 1989. That month, sales of the Living Buddhism book and attendance at the Living Buddhism A Photographic Portrait exhibition were helped by a cover and eight-page feature, The Children of Buddha, in the then wonderful Independent Magazine (above right) published nine days before the book and eleven days before the exhibition opened at the British Museum.
Having seen the pictures, Life magazine called in a rush and the transparencies were flown by Concorde to New York, and then … well, anyone who has worked in magazines could guess what happened next.
To be fair, 1989 was a year of back-to-back big news, and the importance of magazines is intended to be a transient thing. We are therefore grateful that printed books are more permanent.
As, with a little earthly help, is one photographic exhibition.
Living Buddhism in Retrospect and Prospect runs in the Foyer of the Main Library
at the University of Edinburgh from 12 September to 6 October 2011.
Diary of events for 15 September 2011
In the Foyer of the Main Library, University of Edinburgh:
• 12:30pm – 4pm: Graham Harrison and Ian Astley will be guiding visitors round the displays
In the Lecture Theatre of the Language and Humanities Centre, basement of the David Hume Tower:
• 4:30pm – 5:30pm: Ian Reader (University of Manchester), Buddhism in Crisis? The problems of Temple Buddhism in Contemporary Japan
• 6pm – 8pm: A showing of Neil Cantwell and Tim Grabham’s KanZeOn
