Let There Be Light

What is a photograph?

It is a moment becoming forever divorced from its original time and place. Chemically sealed and frozen, it can be transported anywhere for any use at any future time. And yet, it is also the opposite of this. Because a photograph is never able to divorce itself completely from what it captures, it is bound to the politics of its subject matter.

The photographer as artist, and the photograph within the world of art, has tried every possible contortion to rid itself of these politically-charged origins – to negate the subject in the photograph, to turn the image into mere 'material'. While aesthetic and 'digital' debates around the medium have soared, the matter of where the photographer was, why he was there, what he was trying to capture, the circumstances of that moment, the place and its politics are seen as secondary to his 'visual style'.

At Photo Kathmandu, Nepal's first international photography festival, which ran from 3 to 9 November in Patan, Kathmandu Valley, we witnessed a reversal of this trend – the politics and provenance of the photographs exhibited were key elements in the process of curation. And so each exhibition became a medium for a communion of time, place and people.

Nepal was the focus of all 18 exhibitions at the festival. Designed to be exhibited within a half hour's walk from each other, the exhibitions became a reminder that when the photograph is brought as close as possible to those among whom it was taken, it has an inherent power to engage. Words like 'public', 'participatory', 'local', accurately describe what took place, but have been (ab)used too often already. So let us say instead that it was a return to a photography of intimacy, light, shadow and dust.

Through these four exhibitions, it is possible to re-create our journey on the streets of Patan, and the stillness given to us by the photographic portals that allowed us to fall deep into their essence for each of those seven days.

The archival turn
In his famous 1994 lecture, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression" presented in London, Jacques Derrida had given his spectators a though provoking image of the archive – the arkhe as the place where everything begins, where power itself originates: "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation."

The founders of Photo Kathmandu, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Bhushan Shilpakar, are also the founders of Nepal Picture Library (NPL), a digital archive of over 50,000 photographs sourced from families, photo studios and photojournalists from across Nepal. Several exhibitions were curated from the NPL collections, and collectively they provided a new place from which to imagine the Nepali identity and culture.

At the Patan Museum, we were introduced to the work of court photographers running private studios. The photos depicted their early clients, i.e. the burgeoning Nepali middle-class looking to mirror the stance, the posture and the gaze of the royal family.

By the 1960s, a rebellion was brewing against this classic style of portraiture. There was something new in the photographs: disco swag, men posing barechested, multiple exposures creating faces within faces, self-reflexive photographs questioning the photographer's complicity with the camera, and of course the famous filmi photo (men and women posing like their favorite Bollywood idols) heralding the arrival of  cinema halls in Kathmandu.

What do these kinds of images do for the imagination? For the outsider, it displaces the romantic Himalayan landscapes, tales of sherpas and basecamps. It gives a new visual vocabulary, an experimental, playful and human engagement with which to begin a careful reconsideration of our pre-conceptions of Nepal. For the insider, it reveals a multiplicity of Nepals (and Nepalis) that are either forgotten or overwritten by a centralising narrative. Most importantly perhaps, it shows the roots of a local modernity and of a serious photographic legacy.