By Thomas CytrynowiczTenzin and I first met in 2019. She had just turned 11, and I had come to stay a few days at her family's guesthouse in the village.
I quickly got along with her parents and asked if I could spend some time taking photos of the four of them: Tashi, the dad, Dolma, the mom, Tenzin, and her older sister Ringzin.
They happily agreed and decided to wear their traditional outfits for the occasion, the ones they wear for weddings and other official ceremonies.
It was a sweet family portrait, and I brought a print of it with me when I finally made it back to the Spiti Valley, six years later.
The original family photo in 2019, the first time we met.
Of course, Tenzin had grown. The child I remembered was now a teenager, home for a short while before heading back to school, away from the village.
We made new photographs together, and she wore her new dress, proudly.
When Emi and I returned again in the summer of 2026, a series started to take shape, almost on its own, from the little time we spend together whenever we visit the guesthouse.
By now we know the ritual. While we move things around in the living room to make space for the camera, she changes into the outfit she has chosen, always a dress with intricate patterns.
Her photos have slowly become something more than simple portraits. They are a record of time passing, of her growing up and becoming an adult while everything around her moves and changes too.
Taking the same photo of the village six years apart, almost to the day, I noticed how much less snow there was on the mountains behind it. Another sign of the warming of the Spiti Valley, like everywhere else in the world.
For a village that lives almost entirely off agriculture, what does that mean for the future?
Tenzin doesn't know yet what's ahead of her. Maybe she'll leave the valley to study, like so many young people here when it's time for university.
And if these photos have become a record for me, one that might someday tell a wider story of personal and community change, they are first and foremost a record for the family. My pictures are now part of their archive, and it made me quietly happy to see that first photo from 2019 framed and hanging in the kitchen.
The photo I took in 2019 is now framed in their kitchen.
That, to me, is the real beauty of photography: it's something to print, and something to give.Thomas Cytrynowicz
As the seasons pass and Tenzin wears a new dress each time, I can't wait to go back and make another portrait together.
This is what comes from returning to a place, again and again over the years. A photograph stops being just a moment frozen in time and becomes part of a story.
Tenzin over the years
