My Lens, My Land

At 4,300 meters on the grasslands of Amdo, Tibet, Daze and his family move with the seasons, their lives shaped by the rhythms of nature and Buddhist belief. This was the world I encountered when I first arrived on the grassland. Seemingly constant, but already shifting.

Grassland degradation is accelerating. The proliferation of pikas, compounded by decades of government intervention, has left the land’s ecological balance increasingly fragile. Daze began pointing his camera at the ground beneath his feet. What started as documentation gradually changed him. He began to see ecological imbalance differently, and to reconsider his own place within it. In his conversations with his daughter, you can hear this shift: a herder trying to find some way forward for the next generation amid uncertainty.

His camera eventually became more than his own. Filming turned into a form of gathering, and the community began to organize collective action around ecological decline. This process moved me, and it is what compelled me to pick up my own camera. Not to explain from the outside, but because I saw in Daze something I believe in: that a camera is not merely a tool for looking. It can transform the person holding it, and in turn, those around them.

My Lens, My Land does not offer resolution. It observes a community negotiating between land, livelihood, and the generations to come. Things that are unfolding, without conclusion