- Christina Noble
- Info
- Events / Exhibitions
Christina Noble was born and brought up in Cairndow, Argyll, Scotland. After gaining a degree in English Literature, she moved to the Indian Himalayas, where she lived from 1970 to 1990. She ran a Himalayan trekking company and wrote about her life in India in two books, Over the High Passes (1987) and At Home In The Himalayas (1991). She has also published Ardkinglas, The Biography Of A Highland Estate (2018).
After leaving India she returned to the United Kingdom. She is the Director of Here We Are in Cairndow, a project which aims to sustain the local community and enable it to prosper in the modern world. She is also the founder of Miyar Mufflers, a project involving women in Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh, India.
Now looking back from 2025 she writes:
“In 1970, my first trek was a 6 week walk and scramble from Manali to Kashmir. I was 28, now I am 82.
Sorting through the images, many of which I hadn’t looked at for years, was surprising. Most places and people and the narrow tracks, the high passes and the rest houses, I had no trouble recognising.
But it was often emotional: re-envisaging the moment when I took that photograph, it brought back what I was thinking and wanting and feeling at that moment. I re-called the conviviality and familiarity of the people I was with and met, set against the scale of the mountains. It was so much of what I was then. I miss it.
I hope that these photographs may convey something of what I was seeing when I took them.”
place holder
SOAS, University of London
5th June 2025 5:15pm
B103 (SOAS gallery building 1st Floor)
Launch of the Christina Noble Archive: An online collection of photographs
Christina Noble’s photographic archive was digitised in order to make a comprehensive catalogue of her black & white photos taken in the West Himalayas during 1970-2000s. The collection is significant because Christina lived there and photographed consistently during this period. She set up a trekking company – West Himalayan Holidays Ltd – in 1970. Many of the photographs were taken near Manali, Kullu where she lived. Her treks in remoter areas of Saraj, Lahaul, Kangra in Himachal Pradesh and Zanskar and Ladakh gave her opportunities to photograph in areas seldom recorded at the time.
Some of the images were used to illustrate her books – Over the High Passes Collins 1987 and At Home in the Himalayas Collins 1991 & Fontana 1991 and also used to illustrate her newspaper and magazine articles. More recently they have been exhibited in galleries in London – Kullu Perceived 2014, and in Delhi Living Lightly 2016 & 2022, After Rohtang 2023. These have drawn professional attention to the collection.
For this archive high resolution images were scanned largely from prints.
Each image was inputted into an excel document with an inventory number, date, and geographic location. These were checked against the enlarged prints of contact sheets of each up lm roll. It is invaluable that Christina had retained them from 1970 onwards.
In 2018 The British Museum purchased a selection of over 1,500 of her negatives. Their catalogue shares the same inventory numbers as here, but the descriptions are minimal . https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG12970
In our archive /website search is possible by date and place and images have been tagged by the subject depicted. In addition Christina has written detailed captions for the images.