After watching the changes taking place in Tibet, photography duo Danny Conant and Catherine Steinmann decided to commemorate the Tibetan land and people with art. Now open at Tibet House is their exhibit “Vanishing Tibet,” which includes a collection of artworks wrought from mixed media such as gauze, yak hair, handmade paper, and various metals. In addition to the gallery show, the pair will release a book of their photographs with a foreword by Tibet House president Robert Thurman, a professor of Indo-Tibetan studies at Columbia University.

Ms. Conant and Ms. Steinmann added into their pictures various symbolic materials derived from the Tibetan culture. An image of prayer flags fluttering on a grassy hillside in Tibet was printed on poplin to represent the billowing flags. A photograph of yak butter candles glowing in a dim Tibetan Buddhist monastery was printed with an encaustic wax technique.

“Many photographers know how to take pictures, but they can’t do that much else with their photographs,” Ms. Conant said. Ms. Conant, who has traveled to Tibet to take pictures with Ms. Steinmann four times since 1995, said they wanted to incorporate the finished products with the materials they had seen on their journeys. Their goal, she said, was to represent everyday Tibetan life they saw as quickly vanishing under the hand of spreading Chinese authority.

In true Tibetan fashion, the works are simple, quiet, and direct in their humble beauty — and impossible to duplicate. The haunting eyes of a rosy-cheeked Tibetan boy in one image inspire quiet contemplation, perhaps solitude.

“We wanted to show the things that are disappearing from Tibetan culture,” Ms. Steinmann said, describing how she printed a photograph of prayer wheels on aluminum to echo the material of the wheels that Tibetans spin as they pray quietly in the countryside and in small alleyways in Lhasa, Tibet’s central city.

With the opening of their exhibition, however, Ms. Conant and Ms. Steinmann may be giving up any chance to revisit the land that inspired their work. “There is a possibility that we’ll never get into Tibet again because we will not be allowed in by the Chinese,” Ms. Conant said. According to Ms. Conant, the pair was followed while camping on their last trip to Tibet, and was videotaped by a suspicious Chinese driver during a previous visit. “After a while he realized that we were really harmless. We weren’t trying to overthrow the Chinese government or anything. So he stopped,” she recalled.

Though good-humored about the affair, this two-woman team is serious about the changes that the Tibetan landscape and the native population are facing. Since the construction of the Beijing-Lhasa railway, a large number of Chinese have crowded into the area. In addition, the land that has long been known for its purity has been subjected to unregulated logging and mining. Ms. Conant remembered a photography expedition during which she and Ms. Steinmann were climbing up a mountain that was being mined so quickly they had to turn around for fear that “it was going to blow up right underneath us.”

Many of the photographs, especially of the Tibetan monks, are strikingly sad. Ms. Conant said that this was often intentional. “We could see the destruction,” she said, “and we wanted to record that.”

Despite the oppression from the Chinese, Ms. Steinmann and Ms. Conant shied away from portraying that in their art, choosing instead to keep things “99% Tibetan.” She reiterated that their goal was to show Tibet as it was, rather than depict its destruction. “We wanted to print it in a way that you could look at the images and say, ‘Oh yes, I see how Tibet used to be,'” Ms. Conant said.

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