Outdoor Neophyte’s Photograph included in International Exhibition
“International Tea Time”
20th Anniversary Exhibit
This past May, when Reno resident, Elizabeth Rassiga, read the Call for Entries for a photo exhibition sponsored by an organization to which she belongs, Women in Photography International, she immediately knew that one of her photographs had to be entered in the juried competition. The two subject categories for the exhibit were: images of women and images of tea. Her photograph, “Proprietress, Tibetan Tea House”, blended both categories perfectly. The winning photograph, shot in Tingri, Tibet, was one from among 30 rolls of film Rassiga shot, as the only trekker accompanying the 1997 International Mountain Guides Expedition to summit Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain in the world and sister peak to Mt. Everest.
Acceptance of her photograph into the exhibit, which will tour many countries around the world for the next two years and be included in the permanent collection at Yale University, is as exciting to Rassiga as the fact that she was ever in Tingri, Tibet in the first place. At age 50 years old, with the last of her three children off to college, she discovered the joy of high elevation trekking to remote, inaccessible regions. Five years ago she purchased her first pair of hiking boots at the insistence of mountaineering friend Ruth Anne Kocour and has since trekked into Cho Oyu Advance Base Camp for a one-month stay at 18,500 foot altitude, across the Baltoro Glacier into K-2 in eastern Pakistan, along the Hindu Kush of the Afghanistan border on the western frontier of Pakistan, into the remote Himalayan village of Laya in the Kingdom of Bhutan, and up Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. That first pair of boots also trekked through monsoon rains in the jungle of Borneo.
Armed with only one-week outdoor experience in Desolation Wilderness, at the south end of Lake Tahoe, Rassiga has experienced through her camera lens some the most magnificent, remote landscapes on the planet and the exotic cultures, which inhabit them. Her treks average100 miles and have been as long as 160 miles. “The distance, in retrospect, doesn’t sound all that far, but you have to remember you are dealing with the Himalayan, Hindu Kush, and Karakoram Mountain Ranges. One woman I met in Texas, for example, asked what the altitude was in Bhutan when I landed. I answered that it was 9,000 feet. Her immediate response was, ‘That’s not too bad’. I felt the need to point out to the woman that 9,000 feet is the altitude from which you start up; Laya itself sits at just under 16,000 foot altitude. The entire landscape of northern Bhutan is a constant accordion of ups and downs for the 160 miles it takes to get in and out of the region. In this far northern area of Bhutan, there are no roads, no helicopters. When the King comes to visit these isolated villages, he also walks or sometimes rides a horse. The terrain is so steep that lunch is geared to a time and place where it will be flat enough to perch on the mountainside and eat a short meal.”
“I have been an ordinary woman in extraordinary places,” Rassiga states. The proprietress of the tea house in Tingri was a family member whose daily routine included cooking meals on a stove fueled with yak dung patties and saplings, drawing buckets of water from the well outside the tea house door, and keeping large thermos bottles of sweet, piping hot Sherpa tea filled. In addition, she made the rounds every morning to each of the team member’s rooms carrying a teakettle of water. Walls and ceilings were constructed of packed dirt covered with brightly colored sheets of cloth to catch any falling debris. Onto the bare dirt floor, the proprietress would sprinkle water from the kettle in an effort to keep the dust settled.
Rassiga recalls, “One afternoon, as I sat in the tea house with expedition members, I became aware of a bundle in the corner of the room that began to move. It proved to be a tiny, mahogany-colored Tibetan baby. Every one of the family and guests to the teahouse doted over the child. The morning the expedition jeep left the teahouse for the last time, a backwards glance saw the proprietress sitting on a roughly hewn wooden bench, behind the well, with the baby on her lap. The view directly in front of her was Mt. Everest. She, however, had eyes only for the baby.”
The images which continually command Rassiga’s attention, are not the extraordinary events of pageantry, but the repetitive chores which women of the world perform with such dignity: washing laundry, planting and harvesting, carrying products to and from the marketplace, and caring for children.
The proprietress has now become the ordinary woman who will be visiting extraordinary places as the exhibit, International Tea Time, inspired by a photograph by the late Linda McCartney, tours the world. “Having my work accepted in this exhibit, is a satin bow, which serves to tie up all of the fascinating images of people and places I have been privileged to experience these past five years.”
Elizabeth hosts a story-sharing website: www.outdoorneophyte.com. As a base camp for beginners, it aims to encourage women to experience outdoor adventure and the wondrous people and landscapes they will find there.
You can see the formal Press Release from Women in Photography International here. Their wesite can also be found at www.women in photography.org.