The Sonam Zoksang Archive

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His Holiness with President Obama. The White House, United States. · 2010 Digital

I was born in Kyirong, in southern Tibet, in 1960. My parents carried me out of the country when I was one month old. I taught myself photography after coming to the United States in 1985, and I have been making these pictures ever since — in Tibet when I could return, in India among my people, at Sera and Drepung and Ganden, in the back rooms of temples in Queens and the Hudson Valley and in the audience halls where His Holiness spoke to us. This is the archive of that work.

Sonam Zoksang · Lake Placid & New Paltz, New York
Cover for the collection Tibet, 1990s.

Tibet, 1990s

Documenting the homeland through decades of change

8 photographs
Cover for the collection His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Photographs made over forty years of accompaniment

3 photographs
Cover for the collection The Diaspora in America.

The Diaspora in America

Tibetans building a community in exile

1 photograph

A living archive, in progress

The archive comprises thousands of photographs — Kodachrome slides, color negatives, black-and-white film, and more recent digital work. Most of the earlier work has not yet been digitized. The preservation of this material is an ongoing project; the website you are looking at is the public face of that work.

Read more about the archive