HOW THE IMAGE ARCHIVE BEGAN

The LYWA Image Archive is comprised of images dating back to the late 1960s, received from many individuals and organizations who contributed their original negatives, slides, photos and scans to our collection. An enormous number of images, both formal and informal, were taken over the years of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche giving teachings, accompanying other great lamas of the Gelug lineage, interacting with their students, and traveling all over the world. There are also many images of their students and the extraordinary efforts they made to build and establish the numerous centers known collectively as the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT).

David Zinn, the Archive's Digital Imaging Specialist, reflects on the early days of establishing the Image Archive:

"Having met Nick Ribush, the director of the Lama Yeshe Wisdom Archive, some years earlier, I was aware that there were a lot of photos that LYWA wanted to digitize and organize into a permanent database, but I had no idea of the scale of the collection.

"One day in the summer of 2005 I visited LYWA to help staff set up their scanners and develop the Image Archive. I remember peeking my head into Nick’s office and noticing boxes of photos sticking out of his closet. Nick turned to me and said, “Can I show you something?” We went down to the musty basement and there I found an astonishing number of boxes in disarray, filled with negatives, prints and slides.

"To actually make sense of all of this material was a huge job. Staff at the Archive were already too busy to take it on completely, and photo collections were still arriving from all over the globe, so in 2006 I was brought on board as the imaging archive specialist and I began to sort through this mountain of photographic material.

"It was completely overwhelming! I had managed the digital wing of a professional photo lab in Boston for over twenty years, but I had never seen anything like this. Fortunately, since I had also been a student of Tibetan Buddhism for decades, I was at least familiar with Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, though I knew nothing about the history of their organization and the many centers they had set up all over the world, not to mention all of the important lineage lamas, Sangha members, students and benefactors.

"There was a vast amount of historically relevant material and a huge story to be told in images through the biography of Lama Yeshe, which would eventually come to be known as Big Love."

THE LYWA DIGITAL IMAGE ARCHIVE

Once David Zinn joined LYWA, he organized the professional digitization of LYWA’s in-house collection, along with those images sent by individuals and FPMT centers for the Big Love project. All the scans were managed in Adobe Lightroom where David, with Nick’s assistance, carefully assigned keywords and descriptions for the tens of thousands of images entered into the database.

It would take nearly fifteen years of scanning, cataloging, color correcting, retouching and sorting through well over 100,000 image files to bring Lama Yeshe’s story to light in Big Love. There were a number of dramatic twists and turns along the way, including two potential disasters by fire (a warehouse fire in 2008 at the DigMyPics scanning facility in Arizona and a home office fire in 2012, where David was working on the archive) but in both cases the collection was unscathed and the blessings on the project continued.

As work continued on Big Love, we launched an online Image Gallery to share the images in the collection, making them available for all to browse and search by keyword. The albums in the gallery are organized by year, and feature some of the most notable images from each time period.

David has also provided ongoing assistance in preparing images for LYWA print books and e-publications, and for use on the LYWA website and social media platforms.

Along with the difficult and meticulous editing of the text, in the late winter of 2019, Nick and David finally selected over 1,500 images for inclusion in Big Love, which went to press soon after that.

THE PHYSICAL IMAGE COLLECTION

As mentioned, dozens of individuals and centers sent photos, slides or negatives to LYWA for Big Love. Over a period which spanned at least fifteen years, a steady stream of photo collections arrived in a wild variety of binders, shoeboxes, tattered envelopes and musty photo albums. Here are some images of the collections as they arrived. They would eventually fill twelve 27-gallon storage tubs:

As the collection became more unmanageable, David’s partner Francine Fagundez, also a veteran of decades of professional photo lab work, was brought on board to sort, organize, repackage and protect all the precious originals. This involved removal of the acidic paper and cardboard packaging, and storage of the original photos in acid-free materials. Francine also managed communication with donors and returned collections if requested. Here are some samples of the repackaging in progress:

In addition to repackaging, Francine’s primary responsibility was to label and cross-reference all of the photos, slides and negatives in the physical image collection with their digital counterpart in the Lightroom database, and to enter the details into a digital log so that the entire Image Archive would be searchable physically as well as digitally. In essence, this is a storage system that enables retrieval of the original media if the digital version requires further research or fine-tuning. This complex project continues to this day.

ONGOING WORK

Along with refining and finishing a digital log of the Image Archive, there is also an effort underway to complete the repackaging and protection of the many thousands of original negatives, slides and prints in the collection.

David continues his collaboration with Nick to fine-tune keywords and captions assigned to more than 50,000 primary images in the Lightroom database. As this is a historic archive, staff at LYWA are constantly striving to refine its accuracy. We also continue to add images to the database, including extensive collections submitted by FPMT centers and services, like the recent addition of over five thousand images from Chenrezig Institute in Australia.

In recent years, David has overseen the migration of the highest-quality versions of images from LYWA Image Archive to AssetBank, the digital asset management system shared with FPMT. This ensures the images can be accessed by both LYWA and FPMT staff. The FPMT image collection, which consists primarily of photos of Lama Zopa Rinpoche taken from 2008 until his passing in April 2023, has also been uploaded to AssetBank. The most notable images are available to the public on the FPMT website.

In this way LYWA and FPMT are working together to ensure that the images are safely preserved for perpetuity and can be managed collaboratively into the future. Our vision is to eventually make the entire collection available to the public in a searchable format.

Below are screenshots from the imaging portion of the AssetBank digital asset management system, which houses all the audio, transcripts, images, video and publication assets of the lamas.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LYWA IMAGE ARCHIVE

From the very beginning, students took a surprising number of photos of Lama Yeshe and Lama Zopa Rinpoche, but it’s really no mystery why this happened. In addition to his spoken words, the photos of Lama Yeshe show how he taught with his entire being, using an incredible variety of facial expressions and body language in an effort to turn the minds of his students toward the Dharma. Of course, the same was true of Lama Zopa Rinpoche. As the lamas continued to teach, and more and more students were attracted to them, the number of photos grew, and we are now responsible for managing the enormous collection of precious images.

There is tremendous power in these photographs. They express the awakening presence and energy of the lamas, and so a big part of our job at the LYWA Image Archive is to share the blessing of their expressions and gestures caught lovingly on film by their students. Sometimes serious and intense, sometimes playful or radiating compassion, or sometimes simply doubled over with laughter, a full spectrum of emotions is evoked by the images of these great Tibetan Buddhist lamas for our inspiration and enjoyment.

And not only that, because of the extent of the LYWA Image Archive, we continue to uncover new images of Lama and Rinpoche every day which have never been seen publicly. In many ways this keeps the spirit and inspiration of these remarkable teachers alive.

We are so grateful for the support of our Members, donors and friends who make this important work of preserving the LYWA Image Archive possible. We invite you to join us in our work of sharing these inspiring images with everyone, everywhere.