For over a decade, Albertina D’Urso traced the routes taken by Tibetans who left their homeland, many of them crossing the Himalayas on foot. Her photographs follow where they resettled: across several Indian states, in Nepal and Taiwan, and in cities including New York, London, Paris, Zurich, Rome, Brussels, Amsterdam and Toronto. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2016, Out Of Tibet gathers roughly one hundred colour photographs across 208 pages, with four insert sections interrupting the main sequence — a structure that suits a subject dispersed across continents rather than contained in one place.

What distinguishes the book is where D’Urso points her camera. She works in homes and at private moments, and at gatherings where Tibetan culture is publicly maintained, attending to her sitters’ emotions and their continuing attachment to a homeland they cannot return to. The cumulative effect is a portrait of a community held together by memory, language and religious practice rather than territory. Forewords by His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Lobsang Sangay open the volume, and many of the exiles pictured contribute their own words, so the photographs are framed by voices from within the diaspora rather than by outside commentary alone.

The large format — 31 by 24.5 centimetres, hardcover with dustjacket — gives the portraits room to register as individual lives rather than as illustrations of a geopolitical argument. The insert sections work against the linearity of a single journey, echoing the book’s underlying condition: a people distributed across many countries, connected by shared culture. D’Urso, who was born in Italy and has worked extensively on social and humanitarian reportage, brings a documentary discipline to material that could easily become sentimental.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in this combination: sustained, long-term access to a scattered community; a photographic approach keyed to intimacy rather than spectacle; and a considered physical design that accommodates both. Its subject remains urgent, and few photographic books address it with this breadth of geography and this degree of collaboration from the people depicted.