Transmedia Migration in an Early Buddhist Photograph in Ladakh

A key aspect of early photography in Ladakhi contexts (late 19th century and early 20th) is its ongoing visual relationship to pre-photographic media, including sculpture, printing, and especially painting, which, post-exposure, enhanced photographs for the intended audience. The most common compositions for early portrait photographs of religious teachers draw closely on earlier templates well-established by painting and sculpture. In the process, striking examples of other cross-media migrations are documented in living shrines there, including photographs turned into oleograph prints of the Ravi Varma press now mounted as thangka (painting), and a 1905 Russian drawing of the 13th Dalai Lama, photographed before 1912 in China, and later painted, framed, and enshrined in a Ladakhi monastery to the present day. The convoluted path of this latter object, to and fro across national and cultural boundaries, mirrors the dizzying movement of the formal construction of the authority image across material and media borders.