In the Shadow of the Himalayas: Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim

John Claude White was a civil engineer by education, a colonial administrator by profession and a photographer by vocation. His photographs of the Himalayas were taken from 1883-1908, during the time he worked for a year as an engineer at the British residency in Kathmandu and spent 20 years based in Gangtok, Sikkim as the first British political officer overseeing the British interests in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. Wherever he traveled, he photographed the world around him: panoramas of the vast Tibetan landscape; mountains and glaciers of Sikkim; portraits of the royal court of the king of Bhutan; the monks and monasteries of Lhasa. Mules followed him on the rugged mountain trails bearing his photographic equipment, and ensuring that the fragile glass plates survived the long return trip south intact, to be printed by the Johnston and Hoffman photography studio. White spent his entire professional life working for the British Raj. In 1909 he retired to England, where he published his memoirs: Sikhim and Bhutan: Twenty-One Years on the North-East Frontier, 1887-1908. this book is a tribute to this extraordinary photographer.