Expedition to Tibet

The Buratino Chrono-Camera and Roerich

A Transformation of Vision

In the history of twentieth-century art, Nicholas Roerich holds a special place as an artist who revealed the Himalayan distances to the viewer not only as geography, but as a metaphysical landscape. His Himalayan paintings glow with spectra of violet, azure and ruby red, in which mountains become steps of the spirit leading to other heights.

Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the project of the Research Institute of Astigmatism and the Buratino astigmatic chrono-camera developed within it unexpectedly enter into dialogue with this legacy. Buratino is more than a camera: it is a device for recording time, memory and light. Its method rests on the principle of three-colour photography inherited from Prokudin-Gorsky: three separate filters record the red, green and blue spectra, which are then combined into a single image. Yet where Prokudin-Gorsky used it as a documentary technology, Buratino uses it to reveal a crack between the real and the metaphysical.

In photographs taken with Buratino, the viewer encounters not a familiar urban or natural landscape, but a shift in perception. High-rise buildings dissolve into greenish-violet layers; the sky erupts in rainbow spectral noise; the sun loses its physical halo and becomes a white disc outside time. Ruins become ancient altars, while the sea horizon takes on the character of a prophetic sign. These optical displacements create the same aura of detachment and “disembodiment” found in Roerich’s paintings.

A comparison with Roerich’s painting Himalayas makes the affinity clear: Buratino seems to see the world as Roerich himself saw it—in spectra of the spirit rather than the tonal nuances of realistic perspective. Where the artist used pigments and a brush to make colour vibrate, the chrono-camera records the optical drift of light through filters, creating an image whose substance is no less vibrant.

One might say that if Roerich intuitively painted the world through the eyes of a future optics, Buratino finally brings his visions back into photographic reality. Buratino’s photographs are less “copies” of places than metaphysical mirrors, in which landscapes acquire the same density of symbolism as in Roerich’s paintings.

Thus, the project of recreating Roerich’s views with Buratino both continues Prokudin-Gorsky’s tradition and connects it with Roerich’s prophetic gaze. It is a new archaeology of light, in which each photograph bears witness not only to a place’s topography, but also to the memory of how it was seen and experienced.

When Nicholas Roerich painted his Himalayan canvases, he recorded not only the visible landscape but also the invisible aura of space—its spiritual radiation. The transitions from purple to ultramarine in his paintings reveal a desire to move beyond human vision and touch the energy of the world hidden beneath the veil of the everyday. Today, this artistic intuition finds a technical embodiment in the Buratino chrono-camera. Equipped with infrared vision, the camera reveals a layer of reality inaccessible to the eye yet akin to Roerich’s intuition.

Buratino is an instrument that makes Roerich’s metaphysics itself visible. His pursuit of a vision beyond ordinary sight, of spiritual illumination through landscape, finds a technical equivalent here. If Roerich anticipated this optics with his brush, Buratino puts it into practice—through the eyes of an infrared watcher of time. And so, looking at Buratino’s images, we seem to see Roerich’s paintings created anew: not in paint, but in spectra of light and time.

Expedition Itinerary: In Roerich’s Footsteps

A three-week route through Tibet, designed to let you see the same landscapes as Nicholas Roerich and, like him, capture them—whether with a brush, a camera, a diary or a film. The route is inspired by his 1925–1928 expedition, especially his time in Tibet, and includes places where he painted some of his most famous works.

Duration: 22 days (3 weeks and 1 day)

1. Arrival in Lhasa

2. Lhasa: acclimatisation, Potala Palace, Barkhor Street

3. Lhasa: acclimatisation, Drepung Monastery, Sera Monastery

4. Lhasa—Nagqu—arranging travel permits—Damshung

5. Damshung—Nagenla Pass—Lake Namtso—Bagon (northern shore of Lake Namtso)

6. Bagon—Lake Siling Tso—Damshung—Qangtang (Qiangtang) Plateau

7. Nyima—Lake Dangra Yumtso—Wenbu Nancun

8. Wenbu Nancun—Lake Zhari Namco—Mendong Gompa (Coqen)

9. Mendong Gompa (Coqen)—Dagajia Hot Springs (The Grand Prismatic Spring)—Saga

10. Saga—Lake Manasarovar—Mount Kailash—Darchen

11. Mount Kailash

12. Mount Kailash

13. Darchen—Lake Gongzhucuo—Saga

14. Saga—Lake Peiku Tso—Everest

15. Everest (full day at base camp)

16. Everest—Gawu La Pass—Tingri

17. Everest—Khumbu Glacier: “penitents” ice formations

18. A day of rest in Tingri (Shelkar)

19. Tingri (rest, Shelkar)

20. Shigatse—Karola Glacier—Lake Yamdrok Yumtso—Lhasa

21. Lhasa: Jokhang Monastery, Yaowang viewing platform

22. Departure from Lhasa

What We Will See

Would You Like to Join the Expedition?

What We Will Do on the Expedition

This expedition is neither a holiday nor tourism.
It is an investigation of vision.

We will follow Nicholas Roerich’s route through Tibet—along the same roads, across the same passes and lakes where, almost a century ago, he sought points of contact between people and mountains, spirit and matter, light and memory.

But instead of brushes, we have cameras.

The expedition’s main instrument is the Buratino astigmatic chrono-camera, created at the Research Institute of Astigmatism.
It records not only an image, but time, the drift of the environment and the friction of space against the gaze.
We are interested not in a “beautiful landscape”, but in the moment when a place begins to look back.

Other experimental instruments from the institute will join Buratino in the field:

Fluxus Camera—an open camera
that uses elements of space itself as its sensitive emulsion: dust, water, light, the fabric of air.
Each image is created by the environment, not by us.
It is a photograph made by a place.

Flame Aura Camera—a device for recording invisible processes:
the flow of entropy, thermal traces, residual fields and the auras of sacred sites.
It reveals what usually escapes us—the slow movements of time within a landscape.

We will:

—record Sources of Visual Pleasure (IVN)
—explore monasteries, mountain passes, glaciers and sacred lakes
—work with long exposures and field experiments
—create fire mandalas (Flame Mandala) as temporary energy diagrams of space
—make a documentary about the route, the cameras and the very act of seeing
—keep drift journals and map perception

And, of course, do simple human things:
stop, be silent, warm ourselves in the sun,
and drink tea brewed with water from the great lakes of Tibet.

Because every investigation begins not with technology,
but with presence.

This expedition is an attempt to continue the conversation with Roerich
in the language of the twenty-first century.
If he painted light with pigment,
we will try to record it with time.

After the expedition, we will hold an exhibition at the Roerich Museum in Saint Petersburg.