The Lamas of Tibet gathers Melina Mulas’s portraits of Tibetan Buddhist masters, made across fourteen years of travel, largely during the 1990s, in Asia and Europe. The book is concerned less with illustration of a remote culture than with the sustained act of meeting: a photographic record shaped by repeated encounters with religious figures whose presence, authority, and individual character are allowed to remain at the centre of the frame. Its subject is therefore both spiritual and human, approached through portraiture rather than reportage alone.

That duration is essential to the work’s character. Mulas’s photographs are not presented as an isolated expedition or a single period of observation, but as the outcome of a long engagement with Tibetan Buddhist masters. The resulting collection proposes a measured form of attention, giving the portraits room to acquire meaning in relation to one another. The Dalai Lama’s foreword adds a distinct interpretive voice, while remaining separate from Mulas’s photographic authorship—a collaboration that places the images within a broader Tibetan Buddhist context without reducing them to commentary.

Published in English by 5 Continents Editions in 2005, this hardcover volume contains 184 pages and 68 trichrome illustrations. Its nearly square format, 24 × 24.5 cm, supports a considered presentation of the portrait sequence, allowing the book to function as a sustained body of work rather than a loose selection of images. For collectors, its importance lies in the clarity of that conception: a substantial photographic study built through time, encounter, and disciplined portrait practice, with an explicitly identified foreword and a clearly defined English edition. The work also appeared in Italian as Il terzo occhio; this English edition brings the same sustained portrait project to a different readership, maintaining the focus on encounters and individual presence.