Text and photos Matthew Aslett
Lost for nearly 40 years, a trove of photographic slides depicting life in Tibet and a global pilgrimage for peace were found in a Singapore jungle junk shop, sparking an investigation, a restoration, and a journey to Dharamshala in India’s Himachal Pradesh.
In 1989 one of Tibet’s most revered lamas, Ta Situ Rinpoche and his disciples embarked on an international pilgrimage around the world. Their aim was to gain further insight on the relationship between internal peace and the pursuit of an active peace, or global peace for all nations. During the journey, they would meet with international religious leaders and scholars. The knowledge and insight gained would go on to create the foundation of a world-wide peace initiative which continues to this day.
Documentation of the Pilgrimage for Active Peace (PAP) was created using photography and video, the latter becoming the basis for the documentary film, Pilgrimage For Active Peace 1989 which can be found online. Such a historic undertaking surely deserves to be available as an archive, so how then did hundreds of photographic slides documenting the PAP journey across multiple countries come to be abandoned to mould in the humidity of the Singapore jungle?
Back in 2018, I was searching for ideas to present my work on Laos. The research had reached a suitable pause and I was thinking about possible physical formats that I could utilise for exhibition. I imagined the work being projected using a film slideshow as this was the presentation technology in the era of the project – the 1960s – when the CIA’s Secret War in Laos was waged. With this in mind, I wanted to find some slide mounts and experiment with the various approaches of using them. Merely one or two were needed so buying them anew seemed a little excessive. Fortunately, old photographic slides are considered an obsolete technology by many these days, most amateur and enthusiast photographers have digitsed their film slides and hence no longer feel the need to store the physical articles — many of which would therefore be discarded in secondhand markets around the world.
Singapore’s emporium of the forgotten and unwanted is poignantly named Junkie’s Corner. I am often drawn to places of unique character, and in the homogenous mediocrity of the city state, Junkie’s Corner stands apart. Hidden in the jungle away from the tourist and business districts, the space is managed by the local collectors of antique and vintage memorabilia. These uncles and aunties curate the space as they please and are likely to know the location of whatever it is that you may desire. I approached a Mr Wong who was busy unloading a van full of acquisitions. He understood my ask but was unable to recall where he last saw some slides. He took my number and promised to call if and when he came across them.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t long before I received a call. Mr Wong presented me with a large cardboard box full of smaller slide boxes — dozens of them. Despite only wanting one slide, I took the entire box for 50 Singaporean dollars as he’d gone to the effort of finding them. I had no idea what I’d just bought. Upon initial inspection, I found some vintage tourist slides of Hong Kong which were all faded. There were also a dozen plastic slide containers and a number of smaller white cardboard boxes with labels suggesting they’d been processed by a company in San Francisco, California, USA. Intrigued, I pulled a few slides out and held them to the light. Everything was covered with spots of mould, but other than that, they were in good condition. They appeared to show a delegation of Tibetan monks whose robes I could recognise from my time spent with the Tibetan diaspora at Dharamshala in the north of India.
Since 1959, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his followers have been living in exile due to the continuing Chinese occupation of Tibet. Over the last half century, the Tibetan diaspora has spread out around the world. Tibetans retain their unique identity through spiritual practices which govern every aspect of their lives. I understood that what I had unearthed was a lost fragment of the Tibetan people’s history and it needed to be returned to them. However, the physical condition of the slides, mould and its spores was an issue to which I needed to tend to prior to their safe storage and preservation in the archives of the Tibetan people.
One of the slides showed the image of Pope John Paul II meeting a Tibetan delegation, in what appeared to be the Vatican in Rome. The more slides I viewed, the more questions I had, so I decided to contact a Tibetan friend who, with the help of other Tibetans, concluded the identity of one of the monks to be Ta Situ Rinpoche, a highly respected Buddhist lama and spiritual leader.
The task ahead was clear; I would need to safely remove the mould and then digitise the slides in order to create a backup digital archive on top of the physical archive. Preservation of the slides was the obvious priority but I wasn’t sure on how to best clean them. Would using alcohol or some kind of solvent kill the mould but then compromise on the slide film’s emulsion?
The processing of chromogenic slide film or E6 is long and complicated as it involves six chemical baths. Unlike the infinite reproducibility of today’s digital negatives, there is only one copy. Considering the risk, I took my time to trawl through internet forums discussing the mould issue. The solution, it seemed, was much simpler than expected; alcohol-free baby wipes! At that time Child Number One was still in diapers so we had an abundant supply of the best and safest slide film mould removal tool available.
My personal preference is Pigeon Brand’s 100 per cent Pure Water Baby Wipes. Fragrance free and gentle on slides; just like on babies’ bottoms. They are also cheap and easily available. I started by testing on some less important-looking slides that were either out of focus or blurred. Success! The mould cleaned right off whilst the film emulsion stayed intact. I was on the right path and halfway there. Next would be the scanning.
Before and after each session, I quarantined and cleaned the working area, wiping down both the scanner and slide caddy as well. Mould and fungus in the tropics can pose quite a serious problem so I wasn’t about to take any undue risk. I worked though cleaning each box of slides methodically, tending to both the slides and the boxes. Thereafter, I would scan each slide, making high resolution digital copies. Scanning takes time, especially at higher resolutions. The scanner I used was an older Epson flatbed. The accompanying software was terrible and unusable so I purchased a licensed copy of SilverFast 8. SilverFast offers much more professional controls and has an intuitive user interface which simplifies the process. The software’s dust removal feature did an excellent job, saving time and eliminating the need for post-production in Lightroom or Photoshop. Once a box of slides was completed, I numbered it and placed the scanned digital files in a corresponding subfolder. The physical slides were then placed in another box for storage.
The whole process took a couple of weeks to complete as I was working in my spare time around parenting responsibilities and academic studies. After the slides were digitised, I relaxed a little and proceeded to think about the next step.
I needed to track down and identify the photographer behind the pictures. I really wanted to know how they ended up in Singapore, eventually finding their way into my hands. This turned out to be no easy task. As a starting point I turned to the documentary film of the PAP. At that time in 2019, there was no dedicated website and the film could only be found online on YouTube. Using the film’s production titles, I made a list of the camera crew and tried to reach out to them through social media. I managed to speak with one camera man but he told me he didn’t remember enough to be useful in the search for the photographer. I then tried to verify the geographic locations in the slides. There were boxes of slides that depicted arid high altitude environments featuring snow-topped mountains and glaciers, where monks posed with a westerner, whom I thought might be the photographer.
There were also photos showing Ta Situ Rinpoche and his delegation attending a large-scale public event surrounded by officials in Chinese police uniforms, which indicated these pictures must have been made inside Tibet. I reached out to the camera crew again in an attempt to identify the mountain ranges and the westerner in the slides, but to no avail.
With little or no progress tracking down the photographer, I turned my attention to where best to deposit the slides. One of the reasons for finding the creator of the slides was to discuss copyright and usage permissions. In this case, who would have the copyright: the person who found the slides or the original creator? Due to the cultural and historic significance of the find, I attributed both ownership and copyright to the subjects of the slides themselves, the Tibetan people.
For over a decade, I have been visiting the Tibetan diaspora in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas. The home of the Tibetan Government in exile is an old British hill station named McLeod Ganj. In recent years, the rise in domestic tourism has encouraged rapid over-development and it is now a far cry from the peaceful place it once was. However, it is still the home of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, his followers and the Tibetan administration. McLeod Ganj also functions as the reception and initial accommodation for refugees still making the perilous journey across the mountains from Tibet. The Tibet Museum and AV Archives can also be found there, which is where I made my enquiries as to where to safely deposit the slides and their digital scans.
I spoke first with the Tibetan AV Archive and subsequently with the director of the Tibet Museum. These conversations were taking place during the summer of 2019 when I had just returned from Hong Kong after documenting the Pro-Democracy Movement. The director was keen to meet and we discussed the possibilities of making a couple of exhibitions — both of the lost slides and of Hong Kong. We agreed to meet in early April 2020, flights were booked, visas were granted and everything was set, then Covid locked down the world.
Three years and another child later, I find myself on a plane to India. I am not alone, Child Number One is with me. He is five now and it’s time for his first hike above 3000 metres. The Tibet Museum now has a new director who is oblivious of the project his predecessor and I had discussed, but at last, I’m finally able to return the slides to their rightful place. The new director assures me that they will speak with the monks in the slides to see what they can remember. Ta Situ Rinpoche’s monastery also has an archive, so perhaps we shall one day be able to work out how and why they ended up so many thousands of miles away, forgotten and abandoned in the humid depths of a Singaporean jungle junk store.
Matthew Aslett has supported humanitarian missions for over twenty years, and documented the effects of major global crises since the late 2000s. He’s extensively involved in researching and developing strategies for visualising and documenting human conflict, environmental issues and indigenous communities impacted by international development. Matt has been training and mentoring photographers throughout his career. He’s also a consultant to international safety advisories, and has supported photographers in conflict zones for more than a decade. Matt has been based in Singapore since 2016.
