Media Release

For immediate release
January 31, 2006

Images and stories from India kick off 2006 Mountain Speakers’ Series at The Banff Centre

Brian Harris: Beauty & Transformation,
Thursday, February 16, 7:30 p.m.
Max Bell Auditorium, The Banff Centre
Tickets: $15 at the door

For 18 years, Canadian photographer Brian Harris has been searching for truth and beauty in the hidden corners of Hindu and Buddhist cultures. He’s been using his award-winning skills as an artist to support the work of Seva Canada, a charitable organization that brings eye care and blindness prevention programs to Tibet, Nepal, India, and Tanzania, and this month he brings his work to The Banff Centre to kick off the 2006 Mountain Speakers’ Series.

In 2005, Harris spent five months shooting in India, collecting material for his new 90-minute multimedia presentation, Beauty & Transformation, which includes 500 photographs, videography, and indigenous music to tell the stories of people and projects in various Indian regions. His work represents India’s unique beauty, and his subjects include the keepers of a Darjeeling tea estate in West Bengal, and Cynthia Hunt, whose work in the region of Ladakh will be familiar to Mountain Culture members as the subject of the 2005 Banff Mountain Film Festival award-winning film, The Magic Mountain.

“India is at once elemental and spectacular,” Harris says. “Dogs feast on a skinned, rotting cow carcass lying on the roadside, as hundreds of people pass by in their daily routines of a thousand and one different kinds of activities. A roadside shop blazes on fire as we speed by in a jeep whose horn constantly blasts a demand for immediate clearance. This jeep takes us to an eye camp that will serve 800 people in one day and bus 80 people back to the hospital for eye surgery and return them to their village two days later.”

Winner of the 1997 Banff Mountain Book Festival prize for Best Book -  Mountain Image for his book Tibetan Voices, Vancouver-based Brian Harris has raised more than $230,000 since 1987 to benefit Seva Canada’s sight restoration projects. His travels have taken him throughout Asia, to Tibet, China, Thailand, Korea, India, Sikkim, and Nepal, and his work appears in the annual Seva Canada wall calendar and now on a series of Tibetan Voices greeting cards.

Currently focusing on establishing and expanding sustainable eye care programs with partners in developing countries, Seva Canada works to alleviate preventable blindness through volunteer and professional programs. A fundraiser for Seva Canada, Beauty & Transformation will be presented in The Banff Centre’s Max Bell Auditorium on Thursday, February 16 at 7:30 p.m. All tickets are $15 and are only available at the door.

For high resolution downloadable images of Beauty & Transformation visit: http://www.banffcentre.ca/mountainculture/media/images/