Glimpses of the Lost World of Alchi

Threatened Buddhist art at a 900-year-old monastery high in the Indian Himalayas sheds light on a fabled civilization
* By Jeremy Kahn
* Photographs by Aditya Arya
* Smithsonian magazine, April 2010
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The Alchi murals, their vibrant colors and beautifully rendered forms rivaling medieval European frescoes, have drawn a growing number of tourists from around the world; conservationists worry the foot traffic may take a toll on ancient floors, and the water vapor and carbon dioxide the visitors exhale may hasten the paintings’decay.Two years ago, an Indian photographer, Aditya Arya, arrived in Alchi to begin documenting the monastery’s murals and statues before they disappear. A commercial and advertising photographer best known for shooting “lifestyle” pictures for glossy magazines and corporate reports, he once shot stills for Bollywood film studios. In the early 1990s, he was an official photographer for Russia’s Bolshoi Ballet.
But Arya, 49, who studied history in college, has always harbored a more scholarly passion. He photographed life along the Ganges River for six years, in a project that became a book, The Eternal Ganga, in 1989. For a 2004 book, The Land of the Nagas, he spent three years chronicling the ancient folkways of Naga tribesmen in northeast India. In 2007, he traveled throughout India to photograph sculpture from the subcontinent’s Gupta period (fourth to eighth centuries A.D.) for India’s National Museum. “I think photographers have a social responsibility, which is documentation,” he says. “[It] is something you can’t shirk.”
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Glimpses-of-the-Lost-World-of-Alchi.html#ixzz0jIb0chtx