By Katy Niner

Friday, January 2, 2009

Last spring, photographer Anne Muller traveled to Bhutan to document the Himalayan country's visionary model of governance: "gross national happiness," an approach that balances social, environmental, political and economic well being. 

Tashi Wangchuk, a conservation biologist and cultural anthropologist, pioneered the idea as a graduate student at Yale University, and with Muller recently published a book on the topic titled "Gross National Happiness of Bhutan."

This month, Lyndsay McCandless Contemporary is hosting an exhibit of 21 of Muller's color photographs from the book, an engagement that opens with a First Friday talk introducing the concept of gross national happiness from 5 to 6 tonight. A reception and book signing will follow from 6 to 8pm.

On Thursday, Muller and Wangchuk's wife, Kelzang Lhaden, a Journey's School teach, will lead a discussion from 7 to 8 om at Teton County Library. The talk will beging with a short film screening and continue with a discussion and book signing. 

For nearly a month, Muller traveled around western Bhutan with an ex-monk turned photographer whose large family paved myriad connections in the villages they visited. Muller connected with people at school, at home and at play and captured them busy with living - in competition, meditation and celebration. She found narratives of compassion and inclusivity, of dignity and community.

Muller tells their storeis through photography. The diversity of her photographs - individual and group portraits, landscapes and action scenes - testify to the breadth and depth of the application of gross national happiness in Bhutan.

"The pictures are very beautiful, but the most beautiful thing is the message," Muller said. "I am so committed to it because I feel it is such timely information." In an interview with the Financial Times in 1986, Jigme Singay Wangchuk, Bhutan's fourth king, said, "Gross national happiness is more important than groos national product." Muller first heard of gross national happiness through his assertion.

"That's lovely," she recalled thinking. "I didn't know it meant something that was practiced, an actual governmental policy." Years later, its merit sank in when she covered the 2006 visit of Pema Thinley, the vice chancelor of the Royal University of Bhutan, to the Jounreys School in Jackson. 

Gross national happiness rests on four pillars: good governance, environmental conservation, economic development and cultural promotion.