The Adventurous Quest to Capture Remote Buddhist Caves in the 1940s
Innovative photographers James and Lucy Lo created a time capsule of a sacred space at a vulnerable time.
In the spring of 1943, during the Sino-Japanese War, photographer James Lo and his wife Lucy Lo ventured to a set of remote, nearly abandoned caves near where the ancient northern and southern Silk Road trade routes converged, at the nexus of China and Central Asia. There were 700 carved spaces in the face of a cliff, known as the Mogao Caves.
Among them, some 500 were profusely decorated with sculptures and murals, remarkable examples of Buddhist art that span 1,000 years. Today, the caves’ 2,000 painted sculptures and nearly 485,000 square feet of wall paintings are preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, popular with tourists. But back in 1943, when the Los encountered them, they were deteriorating and neglected. Over the next year or so, the Los systematically photographed the Mogao Caves, as well as the nearby Yulin Caves; the 3,000 black-and-white images are a significant document of these incredible and vulnerable sacred spaces. Many of images of this archive are going to be presented for the first time in print in an upcoming nine volume set, Visualizing Dunhuang: Seeing, Studying, and Conserving the Caves, edited by Dora C.Y. Ching and published by Princeton University Press.
The Los were resourceful in the face of challenging conditions. For light, James Lo carefully placed mirrors and white cloth screens to bring illumination into the dim, dark caves. To conserve film, he sometimes shot two different images on a single sheet of the negative for his large, 6x8 field camera. (He also used a 4x5 Speed Graflex and a 35 mm Leica.) For an on-site darkroom, he brought water from a nearby mountain stream with bamboo piping. The resulting images are not only sharply focused and well-exposed, but also artistically composed. “They made what amounts to a photographic time capsule of the caves as they were in the 1940s, before restoration and conservation permanently changed the cliff face,” writes Ching. “This work was absolutely necessary, but the now vanished views are preserved in the Lo photographs.”
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/silk-road-caves