I love the mountains and the outdoors, but my favorite thing about travelling (aside from eating exotic foods) is getting a chance to meet with people from different cultures around the world. Before leaving for Asia, I had planned on photographing landscapes, mountains, rivers, and ancient monasteries. However, after a few days of travelling through Tibet, I was really drawn to the people there.

In spite of living in relative poverty, the people of Tibet were friendly and open.  They had a sense of humor about life that I was immediately inspired to photograph. The same held true for the people of Nepal.  And although I was there for a relatively short time, I ended up returning home with hundreds of portraits of the people of the Himalayas.

Returning with all of these images made me feel like I had took something of value from the Himalayas without having given much back. While I was there I had the opportunity to visit a school for the blind built by Braille without Borders. It was amazing how little money it took to put a person through the school in Tibet. Equally amazing was just how much it could change a person’s life there. In a country like Tibet, a disabled person has few opportunities outside of begging.

My doctor here in Breckenridge had often told me about a clinic he had helped to build in the Langtang region of Nepal while he was there.  And although I didn’t have time to travel there myself, I decided to donate the purchase price of the portraits I created to help benefit the school and the clinic he had built through Doctors to the World.  The show, Faces of the Himalaya, has travelled to other galleries before finding its way back to Altitude Gallery this January, 2010.  The sale of just a single print can put a student through the school for several months.

Event Information:

For more information, visit www.altitudegallery.com