Photography by Elaine Ling, Artist-in-Residence, March 31 – April 4

In conjunction with the visit to Lehigh University of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, July 10-15, 2008 and with support of the Visiting Lecturers Committee of Lehigh University.

Elaine Ling was born in Hong Kong and lives in Toronto, Canada.  Her work documents travels to Tibet where she photographed the people and their environment, exploring the balance between nature and the man-made.  She has photographed sites of ancient culture and architecture across four continents, at sites ranging from Mongolian deserts to Machu Picchu and Angkor Wat.

Her work has been exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brooklyn Museum, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottowa, among others.

ARTIST’S BIOGRAPHY

Artist-in-Residence Elaine Ling was born in Hong Kong.  She has lived in Canada since the age of nine, and lives in Toronto.  She became exhilarated by the freedom of space and places of nature. Ling has studied piano, cello and medicine.  She has worked as a family physician with special interest in the First Nation populations of Northern Canada.  While based in specialized hospitals in isolated communities that ranged from the Eastern to Western Arctic, Newfoundland, and the northwest coast of British Columbia, she began her 20 year journey in photography.

She has explored the shifting balance between nature and the man-made, photographing the solitude of deserts and abandoned architecture of ancient cultures across four continents.  Sites have ranged from the nomadic deserts of Mongolia, Namibia, North Africa, India, to South America, Australia and the American Southwest, as well as the citadels of Persepolis, Petra, Machu Picchu, and Angkor Wat.  In Havana, Cuba, Ling found an urban landscape that reflected a similar struggle between daily life and the slow forces of nature in a city caught in decay of the immediate epoch and the grandeur of past glory.

Ling’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas, The Henry Buhl Foundation, NYC, The Brooklyn Museum, Musee de la Photographie, Charleroi, Belgium, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and Museet for Fotokunst, Odense, Denmark.  In Canada, The Royale Ontario Museum, Ryerson University, Windsor Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottowa.

Elaine Ling has published photographs in Aperture, The Polaroid Book 2005, View Camera, The Photo Review, Powerhouse Review and Artweek in the U.S. and internationally in foto MAGAZIN, PHOTO Technik International, PHOTONEWS and PROFIFOTO IN Germany, FOTO in the Netherlands, Katalog in Denmark, Cuba Chronicles in Brazil, Reflex in Mexico, Canada World View, Photo Life and the Medical Post in Canada.