02 / Iconography
In pictures
Before Maria Callas, there was Tibet.
Before Maria Callas, there was Tibet.
In 2014, Tom Volf undertook a journey alone from Lhasa to Kathmandu - the land crossing of the Himalayas, off the tourist trails, which will lead to the photographic series On the road from Tibet to Kathmandu.
The rule he imposed on himself: only travel with a 1958 Rolleiflex, the same camera he would later use for his portraits of Maria Callas – by coincidence or homage, the year was that of the Parisian recital.
No image is retouched, none is digital, each medium format negative is printed by hand. The result is a series of monastic landscapes, silent portraits and Himalayan horizons, captured in the slow pulsation of a sixty-year-old film camera.
The approach is in line with previous work on the Arctic, where Tom Volf had already favored the Rolleiflex over any modern camera.
“I was working with a 1958 Rolleiflex as my only equipment, and was looking to offer a different point of view — far from the usual high definition images. Here, no Photoshop, no pixels: each image is authentic and unique. Through these photographs, you not only travel through landscapes, but also through time”, he wrote in the preface to the edition.
Tibet becomes this point of crystallization between a technical obsession – film as resistance – and a taste for undocumented territories.
The set is published as a limited edition photographic book, and some images have been printed in large format for private exhibitions. The series announces, through its methodical slowness and its refusal of ease, the method which will later govern Maria by Callas : working over time, against the standardized media image, as an archive researcher rather than a content producer.
In 2010, Tom Volf undertook a land crossing from Lhasa, through Tibet and the Himalayas, up to Kathmandu. He photographs the route Rolleiflex from 1958, on film, without Photoshop — each image is authentic and unique.
Early work, prior to the Maria Callas cycle which began in 2013.
View the book : Blurb Books
The series was the subject of an exhibition of film photography at the Orenda Gallery, in Paris, in 2010.