Thomas Laird’s »Murals of Tibet« documents a thousand years of Tibetan Buddhist wall painting. TASCHEN now reissues the monumental photo book as a limited »BABY SUMO« edition.
In 1986, Thomas Laird entered the Lukhang, the Dalai Lamas’ private meditation temple behind the Potala Palace in Lhasa. To see the murals, he had to cross a small pond, step onto an island surrounded by willows, and climb up into a dark room on the third floor. There, the murals appeared only in fragments, obscured by wire screens and the faint light filtering in from the water outside. Still, Laird writes, their effect was so powerful that they never let him go.
This encounter gave rise to a project that would occupy him for decades. For Murals of Tibet, the photographer and journalist documented historic wall paintings spanning roughly a thousand years, developing a photographic technique capable of capturing entire wall surfaces in high resolution. The resulting collection stands as a comprehensive record, including works that are difficult to see on site, damaged, or have since disappeared altogether. Following the monumental SUMO first edition of 2018, the work now appears from TASCHEN as a BABY SUMO edition, making Laird’s photographs accessible once again in a more compact format.
In his conversations with the Dalai Lama, Laird learned that murals had played a role in conveying Tibetan history and Buddhist teachings since childhood, even before the Dalai Lama could read. Monks would explain the depicted figures and narratives directly in front of the images. Laird accordingly refers to the murals as »talking walls.« They served as historical records, teaching tools, aids to meditation, and religious images all at once.
Over the course of five years, Laird returned to Tibet again and again, creating life-size reproductions of more than two hundred significant murals spanning the past thousand years. Starting in 2009, digital multi-image techniques made it possible for the first time to capture the monumental wall surfaces in cramped, dark rooms with even lighting and at high resolution. Previously, analog photography had only been able to record fragments, so Laird assembled the first complete images from numerous individual shots. Processing the material after each trip sometimes took months.
The stories within this more than 1,000-page edition are found not only in its content; the creation of the publication itself has a story of its own. Laird initially considered a conventional book format unsuitable for conveying the scale of the monumental wall paintings and the richness of detail in his images. But after discovering TASCHEN’s large-format SUMO format in a Paris bookstore in 2010, the idea literally began to take shape. Shortly afterward, he showed his work to Benedikt Taschen.
For the first edition, published in 2018, the 14th Dalai Lama agreed to personally sign pages for the book. Laird describes how the paper was transported to Dharamsala in heavy crates, requiring three trips to India. In the process, he writes, his work evolved from engaging with the original wall surfaces, through digital image production, to the creation of an independent object in its own right.
In this newly released BABY SUMO edition, limited to 9,660 copies, Murals of Tibet brings together documentation, art-historical context, and the story of a photographic project that occupied Laird for decades. He himself sums up his ambition in simple words: »My work makes the previously invisible, visible; it makes the ancient modern; a hidden treasure is brought through us, to the future.« [TS]
Murals of Tibet. Baby SUMO
Hardcover with six gatefold pages and gilded edges, 35.8 × 50 cm, 498 pages;
in a slipcase; includes a 528-page companion book;
Collector’s Edition (No. 321–9980), numbered and signed by Thomas Laird;
also available as an Art Edition (No. 1–320)
taschen.com