Short Summary

Forbidden Memory brings a group of rare, historically important photographs of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet to an American audience.  The photographer, Tsering Dorje, was a native Tibetan and an officer in the Peoples’ Liberation Army stationed in Lhasa.  As a PLA official photographer, he was permitted to photograph many key events:  marches and parades, “struggle sessions,” the destruction of the Jokhang Temple, and much else. He died in 1991.  His daughter, the writer and poet Tsering Woeser, assembled over 300 of his photographs into a book, first published in Taiwan in 2006 and scheduled to appear in the U.S. in 2020 in a translation by Susan Chen.   This is the only known body of photographs of Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. 

The exhibit is scheduled for October 2019 at City Gallery in New Haven.

What We Need & What You Get

My budget for the project is this:

$3,000 for materials, framing, preparation of captions and hanging the show.

$1,500 for publicity (I want people to know about it!)

$500 for a public reception and to defray travel expenses for guest speakers.

Each donor will be thanked by name in the exhibit program.  In addition:

$75 gets you an 11" x 17" archival inkjet print on the same paper used in the exhibit.

$150 gets you a 17" x 22" archival inkjet print on the same paper used in the exhibit.

$500 gets you three 17" x 22" archival inkjet prints on the same paper used in the exhibit.

The Impact

These are extraordinary, compelling images of a time and place the Chinese government has tried very hard to erase from history.  They might not have survived at all if not for a long chain of improbable events.  But however unlikely, they're here, and I want people to know about them and see them.