Marilyn Silverstone

Marilyn Silverstone (born March 9, 1929 in London , † September 28, 1999 in Nepal ) was a multiple award-winning British documentary photographer and a member of the Magnum photo agency . She converted to Buddhism in India and became a nun and ordained priestess.

First years

Marilyn was born in London, the eldest of three daughters of Murray and Dorothy Silverstone. Her father was the son of Polish immigrants. He first became managing director and later president of the film companies United Artists and 20th Century Fox and worked in London with Charlie Chaplin and other film stars. Shortly before the outbreak of war in Europe, the family moved to the USA.

Marilyn Silverstone grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and attended a private art school for girls , Wellesley College . A one-year photography course followed. In the early 1950s she worked for the art magazine Art news and several design magazines. She then traveled to Italy to make artistic documentaries.

Working as a photographer

In 1955, Marilyn Silverstone started her own business as a freelance photojournalist. She traveled through Europe, Africa and the Middle East, always looking for motifs that matched her ideas.

In 1956 she traveled to India accompanied by the Indian musician, composer and photographer Ravi Shankar . She did not leave the subcontinent on this trip until 1959. What was intended as a short trip became the beginning of a fascination for India, which determined her whole further life.

Her photo series of the arrival of the Dalai Lama in exile in India when he fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against the rule of the People's Republic of China was published as the cover story of Life magazine . Marilyn Silverstone was slowly being perceived by colleagues as a serious photographer.

During this time she fell in love with Frank Moraes , an editor of The Indian Express . The couple lived together in New Delhi until 1973 . Her friends were mainly intellectuals from culture and society. Critical editorials by Moraes aroused the ire of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi . The situation for Moraes became dangerous, which is why the couple decided in 1973 to move to London. Frank Moraes died here in 1974.

Since 1967 Marilyn Silverstone was a full member of the renowned Magnum photo agency. She was only the fifth woman to receive this honor. She photographed for Magnum in Iran , Israel , India, Bhutan , Nepal and Japan . She made photo reports from the often poor life of the simple population, especially in cities, to interior views of magnificent palaces. She photographed Albert Schweitzer and the coronation of the Shah of Persia .

When she was dying in a monastery near Kathmandu in September 1999, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh was preparing an exhibition of her work, along with the pictures of other Magnum photographers. On the day of her death, the exhibition was almost finished. A seminar at St. Andrews University on the subject of the exhibition after the death of Silverstone turned into a commemorative event in recognition of her life's work.

Working as a Buddhist

Silverstone's turn to Buddhism began - as she later relates - with the book Secret Tibet by Fosco Maraini , which she read as a teenager during an illness and which stuck in her memory.

In the late 1960s she wrote a report about a Tibetan Buddhist lama named Khanpo Rinpoche. When Rinpoche traveled to London for medical reasons in the 1970s, she joined his entourage. She decided to learn Tibetan in order to study Buddhism with him. After the death of her friend Frank Moraes in 1974, she decided to join another Buddhist lama, Khentse Rinpoche, when he left London for a remote monastery near Kathmandu , Nepal. Marilyn Silverstone moved into the monastery and made her vows as a Buddhist nun in 1977. She took the name Bhikshuni Ngawang Chödrön . To her close friends, she was now Ani Marilyn . One of her first tasks was to take care of Buddhist youth. This also included a group of young girls who had fled Tibet after bad experiences and now had to be accommodated and looked after. Silverstone also researched the dying customs of Rajasthan and the Himalayan kingdoms . In 1987 she was ordained a priestess in a solemn ceremony in Hong Kong .

In 1999 doctors at Ngawang Chödrön diagnosed: cancer . She traveled to the United States for treatment. There she learned that her illness could no longer be cured. She decided to die in the Nepal she had lived in for the past 25 years. Airlines initially refused to carry them in their poor health. That only succeeded when she found a doctor to accompany her on her return to Kathmandu.

Ngawang Chödrön (Marilyn Silverstone) died in 1999 in the midst of the Buddhist community she had worked for to preserve it.

Fonts

• Gurkhas And Ghosts: The Story Of A Boy In Nepal. Methuen Publishing, London 1964. (Reprinted by Criterion Books, New York, 1970) ISBN 0-316-92875-5 .
• Bala: Child of India. Hastings House, New York 1968. ISBN 0-8038-0670-1 .
• Ocean of Life: Visions of India and the Himalayan Kingdoms. Aperture Foundation, New York 1985. ISBN 0-89381-195-5 .

literature

• Luree Miller: The Black Hat Dances - Two Buddhist Boys in the Himalayas (photographed by Marilyn Silverstone). Publisher Dodd, Mead and Company. New York ISBN 0-396-08835-X
• Russell Martin: Magnum: Fifty Years at the Front Line of History. Grove Press, New York 1999. ISBN 0-8021-3653-2 .
• Isabella Rossellini: Marilyn + Silverstone Magna Brava: Magnum's Women Photographers. New York, Prestel 1999. ISBN 3-7913-2160-9 .

Web links

• John Hilleson: Obituary (English) in The Guardian : Marilyn Silverstone: She abandoned the glamor of photo-journalism to become an Buddhist now in Nepal . [1]
• Silverstone Estate archived photographs, 13 pages of thumbnails