Research trip to the national archives (NARA)

Apr 8

Written By Náyade

Studio Nyandak recently travelled to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Maryland to obtain and digitize the U2 spy plane images of Tibet taken during the 1950s and 1960s. This is part of our Tibet from above research. Our research trip was funded by the generous support from the Rubin Museum’s 2024 Rubin x Research program, and conducted alongside our project collaborators, Professor Karl Ryavec from University of California Merced, and U2 aerial imagery expert, Lin Xu.

We obtained more than 8,000 images of the Tibetan plateau spanning from Gang Rinpoche (Tib: གངས་རིན་པོ་ཆེ, Sanskrit: कैलास, Eng: Mount Kailash) in western Tibet to the Tso Ngönpo (Tib: མཚོ་སྔོན་པོ་, Eng: Lake Kokonor) in Amdo region of eastern Tibet. We are working on processing and geolocating the images and will make them publicly available in the coming months.