Frédéric Lecloux, a Belgian-French photographer, was drawn to Nepal in his 20s by the travel guides and books that spoke of the magic of the Himalaya, the cultures to be discovered, and the many lives to be lived on the roads between the peaks. With Cat Steven's Katmandu as his soundtrack, he photographed the mountains in all their glory, creating postcards that confirmed what he had seen in his dreams. As is the case with many travellers, in his first journeys in the 1990s, he was living more in the words and images he had seen of Nepal than with the world in front of him.
Lecloux found himself returning again and again to Nepal, during the civil war that killed many thousands, during reconstruction, during the failure of the successive governments to give the people what it had promised, during the famines, and most recently, during the earthquakes in April-May 2015. At first, he donned the image of the photojournalist working for NGOs and newspapers. But soon, he knew this was not his purpose. He was not there to document for posterity the historical landmarks that Nepal would be known by.