Tabo, Alchi, and Mustang

Jaroslav Poncar's photography was crucial to my academic career. My first task on a project led by Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter in Vienna was to sort through approximately 750 photographs of the Tabo Main Temple, which Roger Goepper and Jaro Poncar had generously given to her. The documentation was carried out in 1984 and shows the monument still undisturbed by the interventions of the 1990s. Eventually, I was also given a slide set of these photographs to bring to Vienna, and the scans form the basis of the ◊ Tabo galleries.

Shortly after, I was fortunate to meet Jaro at Alchi during my 1990 trip to Ladakh. Although I lost my photographs on that trip due to a malfunctioning camera, I gained a friendship and, eventually, access to Jaro’s impressive archive of the monuments. These form the basis of “Alchi, Ladakh's Hidden Buddhist Sanctuary”, the volume we published with Serindia Publication. The ◊ Alchi galleries include that documentation and complement it with all the material available to me while studying the monument.

Jaro often told me about his trip to Mustang, and in 2010, we had the opportunity to visit Mustang together. At that time, I was so impressed by the collections of portable items in the monasteries that I began documenting them as part of my ongoing research project, Tibetan Buddhist Monastery Collections Today. Jaro joined the research trips to Mustang from 2015 to 2018 to help document the collections. Jaro also provided his photographs of the ◊ Luri and ◊ Lo Manthang for my research and the respective galleries.

Jaropa

Given his accomplishments in photography and the sheer wizardry with which he captured the ambience of temple interiors, flashing in different sections of the space with the camera cap on – cap off, one of our jokes was to introduce him as photo-siddha Jaropa.

Chuli Momo

Jaro grew up in Litoměřice (Leitmeritz), a region known for its apricot dumplings. With apricots, called chuli locally, plentiful at Alchi, it was inevitable that Jaro insisted on filling the local steamed dumplings (momo) with them.

Panorama by Jaroslav Poncar

Panorama Photography

Jaroslav Poncar’s true passion is panorama photography, which he practised continuously for fifty years, resulting in numerous publications and exhibition contributions.

Inspired by Josef Sudek's Praha panoramatická, he used a Soviet FT-2 camera for his first panoramas in Ladakh in 1976. This 50mm camera requires hand film changes in a change bag, has a fixed aperture, offers only three shutter speeds, and allows eight exposures per roll. Furthermore, anamorphosis, the curved distortion that slit-scan optics introduce whenever the camera tilts or a long horizontal building is photographed head-on, needs to be managed. Most of Jaro’s panoramas, both colour and black-and-white, were made with this camera.

In the 1990s, the Super Roundshot opened new possibilities. This 70mm rotating camera not only allowed 360-degree exposures with the same person appearing multiple times, but it could also be run on rails along a wall, covering a hundred metres in a single exposure. Jaro used this camera to document the reliefs at Angkor Wat.

If you want to read more about his perspective on panorama photography and see examples, you can download a book on the subject here, which Jaro kindly made available. Books and photographs are available via his website.

Short Biography

Jaroslav Poncar (born 1945 in Prague) is a photographer and retired professor who specialised in imaging sciences at the Fachhochschule Köln (Cologne University of Applied Sciences), where he was based after settling in Cologne in 1973. His photographic work has taken him across Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and Asia — with a particular focus on the Himalayas, Tibet, Ladakh, India, Burma, Cambodia, and Afghanistan.

A pioneer of panoramic photography, Poncar began working with the panoramic format in 1976 and pursued it for four decades. He was co-director of the German Apsara Conservation Project at Angkor Wat until 2005, and following his retirement in 2010 he served as a GIZ-CIM (German International Cooperation) expert in Afghanistan, photographically documenting the country's cultural heritage.

His extensive body of work has been published in numerous books and calendars, and his photographs are held as fine-art prints. He has collaborated with scholars of Asian art and Buddhist studies, including on the documentation of Himalayan monastery art and architecture.