The Intimacy of Film: Tim Roodenrys Captures the Artisans of Tibet

In 2001 after leaving the Navy, Tim Roodenrys was backpacking across Southeast Asia without a plan. He bought a bus ticket from Laos to Southern China and found himself on the Tibetan plateau in the Kham region.

“I was on a sleeping bus and I woke up in the morning and noticed that outside the bus was grassland, yaks and the most beautiful blue sky I’ve ever seen. I saw monasteries, stupas and nomads. I didn’t realise it, but I was actually in Tibet on the Chinese side. Everything was so beautiful, I couldn’t close my eyes for a second. I ended up spending two months on that plateau.”

Returning home to Australia, Tim spent six years studying photography and then working in fashion photography, but his mind kept drifting back to Tibet. In 2007, he returned to the plateau to create a photo book that captured the region and its people in that specific moment in time.

Tim’s book Khampa: Portraits of Eastern Tibet, was shot in a slow and intentional process over eight weeks on an old V series Hasselblad medium format camera in both colour and black and white negative film.

On his approach to photographing, he shares that he immersed himself in the culture and landscape. “I didn’t carry my camera on every occasion. I sat and hung out, ate and drank with the Khampas, and absorbed myself into the landscape around me. By being immersed in the culture, I was able to understand the subtle lines of communication and the appropriate time to take the photo,” what he calls “the space within the space.”

The choice of shooting on film and on the Hasselblad was very intentional.

“Everyone thought I was crazy to shoot it on film because everyone was shooting on digital then. But being in Tibet where there was so little technology around, it would’ve felt really funny for me to have a big flashy camera with screens. I think the process of photographing portraits with film, you connect with people differently because it seems more intimate. You only take one or two photos, so your intuition and your senses are a lot more tuned into capturing the right millisecond of the moment.”Tim’s background in fashion photography can be seen in the book’s depiction of the colourful and unique way that the Khams wear different textures and textiles in everyday life.

In 2010, Tim moved to Dharamshala; home of the Tibetan government-in-exile in India. While studying the Tibetan language, he discovered the traditional carpet-weaving cooperatives established by the Dalai Lama in the 1960s to provide income for the Tibetan community in exile and preserve their culture.

“I love textiles. The carpet weaving cooperatives combined my biggest loves of Tibet and textiles, and also the community approach to living and to working.”

Tim ordered some rugs for his apartment in India and spent a lot of those days sitting in the weaving workshops, practising his Tibetan, drinking tea and watching the weavers work. When he returned to Australia, he ordered a tiger rug for his Sydney home.

“I’d seen a tiger rug once but I’d never seen one in the workshop,” he shares. The artisans dug through old patterns in storage upstairs, and Gen la, “the master designer,” pulled out one from 20 or 30 years ago and made him one.

His friends in Australia started commenting on his tiger rug, so Tim decided to order ten more, and from there a long-lasting collaboration emerged. Each rug takes two weavers two months to weave by hand and before that, a year to finalise the design based on the traditional tiger patterns.

While he no longer works in fashion photography, Tim uses photography and video to share how the rugs are made and the context they’re made in, photographing the rugs high in the Himalayan mountain tops.

“I’ve done a few shoots up there now and it’s really quite difficult because you’ve got to carry the rug up for five hours. And my tripod weighs 5 kilos too, a big old Italian Gitzo tripod. But it seemed like the natural place to photograph the rugs. It’s the home of the weavers and 100 kilometres on the other side of those mountains is their homeland of Tibet. The Himalayas are the heartland of the rugs and it’s shaped the design and it's shaped the weavers.”

For Tim, the tiger rugs and the book have been a way to stay connected to Tibet from his home in Australia and to help others connect with Tibet too.

“It’s a big thing with the rugs and with the book – I just want to keep people remembering Tibet and keeping it in their hearts. I just see myself as a middle person between people in Australia and the Tibetan people and culture. And I couldn’t do that without photography. It's about the rugs but it's about the imagery too. It’s telling the story of the Tibetans through that, about the people who make the rugs and the history of why they are living in exile from their homeland."