A Pause on the Path

"A Pause on the Path" is a travel diary in which photographs and expressionistic narrative draw the reader into an experience of village and monastic life in Buddhist Ladakh. Ronald Silvers tells of his journey during three summers in which he discovers a world that is unfamiliar, but never strange. Traveling through the countryside of this Tibetan plateau, encountering daily family life, witnessing the creating and celebration of a ceremonial mandala, he passed into a liminal region, between the place of an outsider and that of a participant. Silvers' photography forced him to confront and understand the significance of the Ladakhi gaze: a look of unprotected and unjudging receptiveness in the faces of both children and adults. Such moments of quietness and suspended activity such pauses became a signal to the author that he had entered a region where photography could become a medium of the same receptivity.In the stillness of the pause, he lost all meaning of symbolic form and entered into an awareness of the presocial bonding of common human existence with the people of Ladakh. Silvers' compelling photographs and poetic text achieve his intent as a photographer/writer: 'not so much to inform and explain but most of all to arouse longing for a world the reader has never inhabited but has always known'. Author note: Ronald Silvers is on the faculty of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, and the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Toronto.

A record of the author's trips to a Buddhist village in Tibet between 1983 and 1985, this collection of black-and-white photographs and descriptive prose was assembled to "provide a sense of the movement of a journey," capturing "an arrested movement between / a gesture completed and a gesture to come." Silvers' prose observes fleeting moments from his itinerary, rather than tracing narrative continuity, and his photographs mean to build a rhythm, not follow a straight line. The volume, however, falls short of this concept. Photographs depict dwellings, faces, landscapes and religious ceremonies quite straightforwardly while words swoon over epiphanies ("Iridescence; / the mood of mind returns"). Silvers, who teaches at the University of Toronto, fails to marry his mystical and documentary impulses or reveal the elusive truths he seeks. And, though he expresses deep curiosity in a foreign land, his perspective at times seems oddly clouded by cultural assumptions.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.