Yap Paljor Dorji Tashi (Yap Penjorla)

The eldest son of Yap Tse Ten Tashi, Yap Penjorla not only inherited his fathers love for photography but also exhibited the same easy charm of his father. The Rhenock family having traditionally rendered consummate service to the Darbar, it seemed only natural for a young Penjorla to join the Palace in 1966 as the Aide-de-camp to Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal. Conscientious and loyal, he quickly rose to the post of Deputy Secretary to the Chogyal. As Sikkim made the transition from Himalayan kingdom to 22nd state of India in 1974-75, Penjorla also made the personal transition as Deputy Secretary in the Home Department. In 1975, the Department of Tourism was created and he served as the first Deputy Director. In 1979, the State Government created the Protocol Division of the Home Department; he was chosen to helm it as Joint Secretary. He also served as the first Director of the Information and Public Relations Department. He held several posts in his long innings in the State administration until his voluntary retirement as Secretary to the Government in 1997. But Penjorla always considered himself, in his own words, An IPR man. IPR was the Department that he could identify with most, and which most people associated him with. He was happy to be able to continue to explore his passion for photography, and to meld it with his official duties. He was the one who introduced the first aerial photography shots for the annual IPR calendar; strapped into his seat but dangling precariously out of a helicopter, he captured frame after frame of Sikkims natural beauty from his dangerous vantage point. An affable man, Penjorla established a formidable reputation as a man of great integrity and greater humility, earning himself the sobriquet of Buddha Bhagwan. He exemplified the idiom, The height of greatness is not how tall you stand, but how much you stoop to shake the smallest hand.

His friends, contemporaries and most especially his subordinates from various Departments remember him as a simple, unassuming man who was always approachable, and ever ready to lend a helping hand. He had the gift of being able to relate to anyone from any strata of society, a trait that was to win him many loyal friends who still speak of him with much love and respect. A former colleague at IPR, late Mr. Pemba Thondupla, wrote of him: We, in IPR Department, learnt a lot and benefited immensely from his wise counsel. Yap Penjorla himself was so however so modest and unpretentious that he can honestly be termed humility personified. He always passed on the credit of good work to others and took the blame on himself. Generous, sympathetic and courteous, he went out of his way to help his subordinate staff with whom he often merrily shared his snacks and jokes. There was not an iota of vanity in him. It is difficult to ascertain when exactly Penjorla started his tryst with photography, but as he was one of the very first subjects of his fathers photography while he was still in diapers, he was exposed to photography at a very early age. He cut his teeth on the other aspects of photography while helping at his fathers Tse Ten Tashi & Co. studio. Photography was such an integral part of his fathers life that it was only a natural corollary that Penjorla should also gravitate towards it. One of the earliest cameras he inherited from his father was a Mamiya, of Japanese make. A close friend, Mr. Babulal Malu of Panorama, recollects that it was a Sekor Super 23, with 120 mm format. Later, while dabbling with mid-format cameras, Penjorla enjoyed the developments of the 70s and 80s, which saw major battles between the major Japanese SLR brands: Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Minolta and Olympus. Cameras were no longer heavy, all-metal and manual brutes; the invention of the IC resulted in much sleeker beauties with electronic automation and compact, lightweight bodies. Originally, like most other photographers, Penjorla was enamoured of Nikon SLRs. This ruled the professional SLR market, with its dual

advantages of solid quality and worksmanship. Among other Nikon models, he used a Nikon F1 for a long time, and extolled its virtues. In the late 1970s, Penjorla was particularly taken in by his Canon AE1, a 35 mm SLR film camera for use with interchangeable lenses. This historic camera was the first microprocessor-equipped SLR and notched up sales of over one million units, due to a successful marketing strategy. The various manual controls and accessories, combined with the lightweight body and unbeatable price, appealed to Penjorla who went on to own many other Canon cameras.

Like his father, he liked to own and try out a series of modest cameras and zoom lenses. He briefly flirted with other brands like Pentax, Minolta and Olympus but continued to be an A1 and F1 man for the longest time ever, despite owning a more sophisticated Canon EOS Rebel. He was well-conversant with the intricacies of owning and using a SLR, and his conversations were often peppered with terms like aperture/ thyristor/Nikkor zoom/shutter speed at a point of time when there were very few aficionados of photography in Sikkim. With regard to his photography, he was essentially a purist. He mostly liked to work with 35mm Ektachrome transparencies. He preferred the challenge of manual focus, fixing his own lens, and setting the aperture and shutter speed manually for the perfect frame. Although he sometimes enjoyed the relative ease of autofocus, and fixed lens, he held that too much technology killed the real art of photography. He also preferred black and white film, saying that colours detracted from the essence of shape and form.

When the first digital cameras came out, beyond a cursory onceover, he had no real interest in what was being heralded as the new dawn of photography. He was old school; he enjoyed the setting up of a shot, the taking of the shot and yes, the delicious anticipation that marked the wait for a roll of film to be developed and printed. As a photographer too, Penjorla was more inspired by the simple beauty of things. Mountains were a particular favourite. He would wake up early and spend hours waiting for dawn to break over Mt. Khangchenzonga, and capture the changing silhouettes of the mountain in a series of mostly 36 exposures. Although there was no digital imaging those days, he would carefully overlap his photographs on each other and stick them together to produce the entire Khangchendzonga range. He also loved to shoot portraits, and would often be spotted cajoling someone with a particularly expressive face to pose for his lens. At first glance, his photographs are deceptively ordinary. A more introspective examination reveals how his lens manages to capture the extraordinary beauty of seemingly very ordinary every day events. His photos transcend the obvious to explore and reveal to the viewer the finer, more subtle nuances of relationships, events and just being. He was a prolific photographer, and loved to document events and milestones. He built up a huge collection of photographs that encompass mountains, chortens, monasteries, landscapes, flora, fauna, festivals, the Royal Family and always, his people portraits. These are being worked into a currently under-production coffee-table book on Sikkim called Hiatus in the Himalayas, which is, in a nutshell, one mans lens, his daughters words. His soul was his window to the world and his lens captured that essential goodness. Tenzin C. Tashi,