His “double portraits,” in associating a face and a mask, by inverting the sense of the mask, shows us faces in which the formal perfection recalls a vision of world harmony, of an internal coherence anchored in time, in history, in collective practices. The rapprochement of the image of a face of today, fixed in the middle of an ancient chamber, with a mask which is another form of the face, by means of other techniques and with other ritual props, is inscribed in a culture of the complementarity of extremes and the permanence of the double (opposite). Just as our regard circles from one to the other to embrace them in a totality before perceiving within them the details or traits, just as we want to turn them without cease to seize within them the mysterious internal coherence, this practice of the “portrait” puts us back more than ever at the question of the identity of the other side of its history, its culture. And it also says to us, throwing a serious doubt, that the laying out of a face is an exercise which we have forgotten a bit too much, used as we are to the apparent functional evidences of photography which bring into play something other than success or the pertinence of a form.

Gao Bo Photo Tibet 1993-1995
Preface by Christian Caujolle, Summer 1995