On Becoming Part of the Landscape: The Himalayan Project

Following As Dust Alights and Some Windy Trees, Dzogchen is the final part of Vincent Delbrouck's Himalayan Trilogy. 

It's an interesting series where several different things merge;  Delbrouck discovers both himself, the places he lives in (Kathmandu in particular) and the way in which philosophy, photography and ideology merge in a project where landscape, typology and the urban environment all feature.

At times there's a battle with the exotic, but by the time you get to Dzogchen you get the feeling that Delbrouck has won this battle and is getting into the soul of the place. In that sense, the book, the series even, is a meditation (and Delbrouck is into that ) on a particular kind of migrant lifestyle. It's a roll through the stages of being a stranger in a foreign land, and using photography and the visual to become part of it.



It's those parts that are interesting. In Dzogchen, Delbrouck photographs trees, rhododendron bushes and river valleys (these are the most obviously recognisable part of Nepal in the book). It's mostly shot in high Himalayan light with the chaos of dust, wiring systems and concrete setting the scene for the animated chaos that was (pre-earthquake) Kathmandu.



There are pictures of mountains and temples but these are second-tier offerings, pictures of pictures stuck on walls. Add to this the text which gives us an offering of Delbrouck's fluctuating view of Kathmandu life; a world where brain-eating amoeba, trips to the library, stomach problems, and photographic wandering tell you exactly where the pictures are coming from.

The title, Dzogchen, refers to the state of perfection of the natural order of things, so one way of looking at the book is to think of it as a series of random moments that have a certain natural perfection at their heart. But you can see it in other ways too.




Dzogchen follows on from two earlier books in the series, Windy Trees and As Dust Alights. Windy Trees is exactly that - a typology of sorts; pictures of trees in rural Nepal (I think_ that have been bent, stunted and shaped by the wind. As Dust Alights is an entry point to the project, a portrait of Delbrouck's arrival in Kathmandu, initial impressions of being in a place, falling in love with a place, getting a feel for a place.

The Himalayan Project can be seen as hitting the high points of biography, geography and metaphor. The autobiography and geography are those of Delbrouck and Nepal. And the metaphor of the three books is that of the new arrival, the migrant, the expatriate, the stranger. It's the stages of finding a place, both on a personal level and on a cultural level.

As Dust Alights is the initial love-affair of arrival, the curiosity, affection and excitement one gets. Windy Trees is the transformation of self, the shaping of one's world-view, and Dzogchen is the coming to earth, the realism of the transformed view.

Buy Dzogchen here.

Photo Kathmandu

A moment of their own - women dancing by Larry Daloz

A Young Tharu Man from Ravi Mohan Shrestha Collection

Builders from Boharagaun by David Carlson

If you're in Delhi in the first week of November, there's the Delhi Photo Festival (more of which later). If you're in Kathmandu, there's Photo Kathmandu (3rd - 9th November), an event that needs support in particular because of the devastating earthquake that happened there earlier this year.

If you're in both places in the same week, you could do a subcontinental Photo Festival double-header.

I put a few questions to Nayantara Kakshapti about the festival and photography in Nepal as a whole. This is what she said

How and why did Photo Kathmandu begin?

We have been dreaming of this festival for a few years now. After the earthquakes in April and May, we decided to just go for it. Nepal can use all the positive attention it can get this year. A festival will allow us to invite the global photography community to Nepal, creating possibilities for the local photography community to access global networks, and also promote photography to local audiences.   

What are the main events this year?

We will have about 12 curated print shows featuring Nepali as well as international photographers such as Philip Blenkinsop, Kevin Bubriski, Kishor Sharma and Bikas Rauniar. We have 8 workshops designed not only to build photography skills but also skills for writers, editors and others who work with photography. We have an artist residency for photo and jazz artists that strives to promote collaboration and experimentation. And 6 days of programming that will include artist talks, discussions and slideshows.  

What are the difficulties photography faces in Nepal?

Nepali photographers struggle to get paid decent wages, they dont have editors and publishers who understand and value their work enough, they have limited networks to get their work out into the world. Also, it is a challenge to free 'the Nepal story' from either the poor 'third world' country story or the exotic beautiful tourist destination story. We don't have a photography school in Nepal so young photographers who want to learn how to be better at what they do, have to rely on workshops or look at expensive programs beyond Nepal.        

Is photography being used in any way to help overcome the earthquake devastation?

Along with good friends Sumit Dayal and Tara Bedi, we were involved in setting up #nepalphotoproject on Instagram and Facebook since the day after the first earthquake on 25 April. The project aimed to crowd source photographs and information from the ground and inform people about rescue, relief and rebuilding work. 

This is an on-going project that will aim to document Nepal's long term recovery. As mainstream media has moved on, this project looks at keeping the post-earthquake Nepal story alive and accessible. Also, we are selling archival prints from Nepal Picture Library- a digital archive we set up in 2011- to raise money for rebuilding heritage sites in the old city of Patan where the festival will be hosted. This has been a way to sort of lean on our past, to help rebuild for the future. More info at www.support.photoktm.com      

Who are some of the Nepali photographers we should look at?

Kishor Sharma, Prasiit Sthapit, Surendra Lawoti, Shikhar Bhattarai, Sailendra Kharel, Rohan Thapa.

Support the rebuilding of heritage sites in Patan by buying an exquisite limited edition print! support.photoktm.com 

www.photocircle.com.np
www.nepalpicturelibrary.org

The Picture isn't Everything

The earthquake from Nepal has been on the local news and it's all about Bath residents phoning home to say they're safe. There was a live report from someone's front room supposedly showing the mother getting the son's safety message. Now they're arriving home and the cameras at the airports

On the national news it's all been about Everest and reports about how many Britons are still missing and first-hand accounts. From a UK perspective Nepal is all mountains and trekking, probably because when people from the UK go to Nepal that's what they do for the most part.

It's a lazy manufacturing of empathy through choosing experiences we can easily understand - because we know people who have gone trekking, or stayed in a hotel in Kathmandu, or been in a restaurant. It's condescending really, and lazy, a general failure to frame what the earthquake might mean to such a rural, mountainous, landlocked, infrastructure-free nationand the people who live there.

But manufacturing a story within a familiar framework is what it's all about.  We've just had the alive-after-5-days story and we can await the inevitable person-rescued-after-10-days narrative to pop up. And it will be uplifting and bring tears to the eyes, but really... Nepal, China, Haiti, Turkey, Pakistan, they're almost interchangeable. I can't tell them apart anymore.

The need of a tale of salvation or redemption has almost become a condition of any disaster. The sickly tsunami film, The Impossible,  does this. When I watched it, despite my better judgement, that story of family salvation against all the odds got the tear ducts going. The rabidly conservative Bambi/Private Health Care subtexts were another matter and all part of what made it such an objectionable film. But the salvation was the thing, and for saps like me, it worked.

One disaster that lacked that redemption was the most spectacular one of all, 911. Here the spectacle conquered all. And, from my distant emotionally uninvolved point of view, still does.

It seemed like there was an attempt to reclaim the humanity from the spectacle through the identification and beafication of the Falling Man (or the passengers and crew of Flight 93). But it never quite worked or if it did, it was only temporary. Instead the pictures of these horrors became part of the spectacle and never quite escaped it.

It's always a problem for 911, that for all the heroics and the bravery, you never escape the fact that it looks exactly like a disaster movie complete with panicking city dwellers running while casting glances back over their shoulders.

There were objections to the Falling Man picture and it's not shown anywhere near as often as it once was. Nor are the clips of distant people jumping, nor is any of it.

But these objections are selective. Jumping pictures are thick on the ground in the history of photography (this Brussels fire and the Boston fire escape collapse.and here's the Budapest suicide and there's Okinawa...) and if it's not press photos of people jumping, then it's art projects with people jumping or looking like they're jumping. It's a short cut to a belly swirl.

And most of the time we see people jumping, it's a kind of photographic rubber necking. It doesn't really touch me or move me but I look all the same - it's like looking at a car crash. Perhaps we should drop the pretence of ethics and just admit it for what a lot of photography is; photographic rubber-necking, where there's no claim to empathy, or evidence or mourning. I find that preferable to hypocritical and selective hand-wringing.

The manufacturing of hope through generic survival tales is close to rubber necking, but maybe more objectionable. It gives us the ability to experience empathy and get tears in our eyes without making any leap of the imagination into what has really happened. It is applying a Hollywood narrative to a global disaster and making it generic.

I wonder if the real horror memory of the Twin Towers wasn't something that was seen (the visuals were spectacular and I still can't take my eyes off them even now - in the same way I can't take my eyes off tsunami footage). The real horror of 911 did come from those jumping off the towers, but it wasn't the images of the people falling that got me, but the sound of those poor people hitting the glass and the ground. There was nothing Disaster movie about that, it was far too physical and violent and real and it sent shivers down my spine even though not a body was too be seen.

Pictures are never everything. Something else might tell the story better.

Maybe that's the case in Nepal, but what that something else is there I don't really know. Like I don't really know anything about what happened there 5 days ago or what is happening there now. The story simply isn't being told.