The Photo Dharma website is being prepared by Bhante Anandajoti who has been resident in the East since 1987, mainly in Sri Lanka, India, and Malaysia. He ordained in the Theravada tradition in 1995 and received higher ordination the following year.

In 2005 he was given a camera and started taking photographs of the temples he was staying in and the pilgrimage centres he was visiting. These photographs were initially uploaded to picasa web albums. In 2009 he travelled to Borobudur in Indonesia, where he documented the monument with over 1,200 photographs. As this large collection could not easily be published in the web albums he started the Photo Dharma website to accommodate them, and included most of the earlier photographs also.

The website is still expanding with nearly 3,000 photographs published, including recent additions from Angkor in Cambodia, and recently the idea behind the website has expanded to include more materials regarding the history and culture of the regions in which the photographs are being taken. These have normally been modified from Wikipedia articles, which are linked to at the bottom of the relevant pages.

Recently a number of other photographers contacted me with materials they had collected in various places I have not been able to photograph personally, and in that way the Guest Photographers section was started. This is adding to, and widening, the materials that are available on this website.

The photographs are normally published with a minimal copyright attached, and the intention from the start has been to provide resources so that other publishers especially Buddhists can find a ready stock of usable material legally available. The photographs have already been used by a number of publishers in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The photographs are published in high-definition size (1-5 MB) as well as in more accessible medium and thumbnail sizes.

 

Photograph by Leslie Shaw

 

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