cultural crusade

March 2001. Bamiyan, Afghanistan. News outlets around the world reported that Taliban authorities had begun to deliberately destroy all non-Islamic statues throughout the country. Among the carnage were the 175-foot and 120-foot Bamiyan Buddhas, registered on the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites. The news shocked and saddened many. To Tito Dupret it was nearly as devastating as the acts themselves.

Dupret had recently returned to his native Brussels from Ethiopia, where he made a documentary video about the economic, political and preservation issues of the monolithic churches of Lalibela, also registered on the World Heritage List. He had developed a deep love for such cultural and natural sites during years of travel throughout Europe and a 15-month sojourn through eastern Africa, Yemen and India.

So clearly, Dupret's shock was especially affecting and personal. "After that shock, I began to think quick and found myself quite desperate.... I just felt something sure: Don't stay here; you're useless. Just go, you'll see on site. Answers are all on site!" he says in his Belgian, English-as-a-second-language way. Those answers, he felt, were to record what remained of the world's cultural heritage, using UNESCO's list as a guide.

First stop: St. Petersburg, Russia. There, in a travel bookshop, he staged an exhibition of panoramic photos of Russian World Heritage sites. Encouraged by positive feedback from the local press (and spurred by an expiring visa), he continued onward to Beijing, China. By the time he arrived, he had a clearer vision of what would become WHTour, a nonprofit organization dedicating to documenting for posterity and raising awareness of all 754 (and growing) sites registered on the World Heritage List in the form of panoramic photographs and QuickTime VR films.

To date, Dupret has covered 52 sites (7 percent of the list) and created more than 270 VR films. Each film is a composite of 24 images and requires a half day to two days of postproduction. Before his girlfriend (met in the first trip to China) joined the crusade, he did this work alone. His previous backpacking and professional experience as a freelance photojournalist, multimedia director and filmmaker would prove useful. He expects the project to take 10 years in total - if he can find the funding, that is. WHTour is mostly financed from Dupret's own pockets (from his continued freelancing - telecommuting, naturally).

Fortunately, his needs are small. His equipment (besides a good travel guide) consists only of a monopod, a Nikon 4500 with wide lens, and a Titanium PowerBook. (For postproduction and Web dissemination, he uses Realviz Stitcher 3.5, Photoshop 7, Adobe GoLive 6 and QuickTime 6, some of which he's learned on the road. He taught himself how to create cubic VRs, for example, while staying at a youth hostel near the Temple of Heaven in Beijing.) "One person with skills and a backpack is enough to cover any site in the world," he says.

Images are posted on the WHTour website, and to further WHTour's mission and philosophy, Dupret hopes to disseminate them as widely and in as many formats as possible. All are available for any purpose that fits within the ethos, and Dupret deliberately keeps the prices modest and shares the copyright and costs to encourage collaboration.

One such collaboration is the exhibition "A Temple Reborn: Conserving Preah Khan, Angkor, Cambodia" on view until January 7 [2004] at the World Monuments Fund Gallery in New York. It includes Dupret's 360-degree interactive panoramas of the major temples of Angkor along with images by acclaimed photographers Steve McCurry and Kenro Izu. WMF has also sponsored VRs on the WHTour site and commissioned images of the Forbidden City, Beijing.

This campaign may seem daunting, especially in a world "more interested by new cars and the latest mobile phones than ruins and parks on the other side of the world," Dupret acknowledges. But his feelings of "passion, dedication and [usefulness] to others," of which he's often reminded, drive him. Once, in the Philippine Cordilleras, where the rice field terraces are on the World Heritage "Sites in Danger" List, a peasant told him "that he had nine children and that all of them had preferred to go to Manilla in the hope to make a better living. There I understood why the terraces were in danger: no more peasants to take care of them in the next generation."

So this thought Dupret carries in his backpack from site to site.