Tabo, Alchi, and Mustang

Jaro Poncar's photography was crucial to my academic career. My first work on a project led by Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter in Vienna was to sort through approximately 750 photographs of the Tabo Main Temple, which Roger Goepper and Jaro Poncar had generously given to her. This documentation was done in 1984 and shows the monument still undisturbed by the interventions of the 1990s. Eventually, I was also given a slide set of these photographs to bring to Vienna, and the scans form the basis of the ◊ Tabo galleries.

Shortly after, I was fortunate to meet Jaro at Alchi during my 1990 trip to Ladakh. Although I lost my own photographs on that trip due to a malfunctioning camera, I gained a friendship and, eventually, access to Jaro’s impressive archive of the monuments. These form the basis of Alchi, Ladakh's Hidden Buddhist Sanctuary, the volume we published together with Serindia Publication. The ◊ Alchi galleries include that documentation and complement it with all the material accessible to me while studying the monument.

Mustang

Short Bio

Jaroslav Poncar (born 1945 in Prague) is a photographer and retired professor who specialised in imaging sciences at the Fachhochschule Köln (Cologne University of Applied Sciences), where he was based after settling in Cologne in 1973. His photographic work has taken him across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia — with a particular focus on the Himalayas, Tibet, Ladakh, India, Burma, Cambodia, and Afghanistan.

A pioneer of panoramic photography, Poncar began working with the panoramic format in 1976 and pursued it for four decades. He was co-director of the German Apsara Conservation Project at Angkor Wat until 2005, and following his retirement in 2010 he served as a GIZ-CIM (German International Cooperation) expert in Afghanistan, photographically documenting the country's cultural heritage.

His extensive body of work has been published in numerous books and calendars, and his photographs are held as fine-art prints. He has collaborated with scholars of Asian art and Buddhist studies, including on the documentation of Himalayan monastery art and architecture. Books and photographs are available via his website.