An exhibition showing from August 11 to 20 at Siddhartha Gallery in Baber Mahal Revisited will present an overview of the Shrestha collection for the first time to a wider audience.[break]
Working more than 25 years for Nepal Tourism Board, Shrestha’s photographs became synonymous with the promotion of tourism in Nepal.
Countless travels brought him not only to the most beautiful locations in the Nepali Himalaya but also the Terai lowlands, the middle hills, and various festivals of the Kathmandu Valley.
A selection of some of the best photographs he captured during these journeys will be presented in the show and contextualized through captions citing snippets of his knowledge about the situation in which the images had been taken.
On the side of his ‘official’ assignments, Shrestha also continuously photographed for himself and his family, further developing his unique and very personal style of portraying people and capturing situations of everyday life and ritual. It is in these works that his true mastery of the photography profession becomes obvious.
Reaching beyond the habitual skills of v craftsman, he extensively experimented with the aesthetic quality of images, trying out different perspectives and composition techniques as well as formats – always in search for a photograph that captured the personality of a person or the emotional and aesthetic quality of a certain scene in the best possible way.
Today, many years after his photographs were taken, Shrestha’s photographic oeuvre has gained an additional layer of importance, reaching far beyond its mere aesthetic qualities.
Many of the images he took are of great importance for historians and people interested in the anthropology of Nepal. Over the many years of his career as a professional photographer, he documented countless festivals and ritual practices that do not exist as such anymore today.
Many unique traditions of Nepal have vanished over the years: architecture, crafts, as well as dresses and materials in general that once formed the aesthetics of everyday life. With their disappearance, the identity and self-understanding of the various ethnic groups of Nepal have been transformed.
A journey through Shrestha’s imagery allows us a glimpse into the past, and his photographs bear the power to, for a few moments, evoke the cultural transformations brought about in the past decades.
Personal historical photographic archives such as Shrestha’s pose a dramatic task to the anthropology of tomorrow. In the future, scholars wishing to work on the cultural systems of vanished cultures will have to heavily rely on archives and other historical collections.
Projects like the Nepal Picture Library (NPL), that took the initiative to digitize and contextualize the image collection exhibited, will be of tremendous importance. It is archives like NPL which rescue primary sources – which might not be of great relevance at the time they are created, but in the future, their contents suddenly become important.
Shrestha’s photographs exhibited on all the three floors of Siddhartha Art Gallery will be organized around their contents and their level of intimacy to the photographer:
The ground floor, which most strongly represents his commercial work as a photographer for the then Nepal Tourism Department, is concerned with large format color images.
Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha/Nepal Picture Library
These photographs document the sheer beauty of the Nepali cultural environment. This layer strongly resembles what would today often be termed as “travel photography,” a genre which is generally only of limited anthropological value: photographs are strongly composed and staged to represent something the photographer (or his clients) wants to see.
For an anthropological use, such images usually need a contextual embedding: only if their contexts are well documented (possibly in a written form), they are able to give actual insights into the pictured scene. It is Shrestha’s knowledge of the actual situation in which the images were taken that turns them into historic and ethnographic documents.
The first floor, which is also linked to his commercial work for the tourism sector, is concerned with perspectives of the people, events and places that he understood as representative for Nepal in a touristic but also a non-touristic sense: picturesque scenes of people in ethnic clothing, photographs documenting different rituals and images of inhabited landscapes and architecture – albeit from the surface.
The top floor, which is defined by Shrestha’s early black and white materials, is not only aesthetically but also ethnographically of great importance. Since the time Shrestha got his first camera, he started to shoot pictures of his family members and situations he encountered in his everyday life.
Differing to his other (commercial) images, these photographs give the viewer an insight into a sphere of Nepali life that is hardly pictured elsewhere. His personal relation with many of the subjects is translated into portraits of immense beauty – of others but also himself.
Through his very personal eye we can experience the visuality of Nepali life and how it changed over the years. The bellbottoms and sunglasses of the ’70s can be seen, but also ancient rituals of the Kathmandu Valley.
Visible are the tattoos of ethnic groups that have long vanished today, as well as the expression of people showing their first portable radio to the photographer. This third and most extensive part of the exhibition is the actual ethnographic treasure box of the Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha collection.
Shrestha’s photographs are prime examples that show how real treasures for anthropology often don’t lie in the archives of professional anthropologists but can actually be found in the personal photo albums of ordinary people.
In the given case, we are lucky that the lay ethnographer was actually a professional photographer with an outstanding sense for beauty and composition. In the future, anthropology will heavily rely on such sources.
They seemed marginal at the time when they were taken, but over the years, they developed into visual time capsules of the aesthetics and knowledge of the past.
It is this fact that renders projects like the Nepal Picture Library such a great importance. There are hundreds of thousands of images on Flickr which keep on repeating what everybody has already seen a hundred times: The exotic “traveler’s” Nepal.
For people honestly interested in the people of Nepal, though, they have to go beyond the obvious and turn to private images, be it in historical collections like in Shrestha’s case, or in family albums. It is only if we honestly look into someone’s face that we can really learn something about him or her.
Over the past 14 months, NPL has been digitizing more than 11,000 slides and negatives from the Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha collection.
The NPL is an archiving project that wants to contribute to the study of Nepali photography, as well as generate knowledge, and raise questions about how issues of memory, identity, and history can be explored through images.
The writer is a Nepal-based anthropologist and photographer whose work focuses on the Greater Himalayan region, especially the shamanistic cultures of Eastern Nepal and the Naga tribes of Northeast India and Burma. He curated and co-curated several exhibitions on South Asian topics in different European museums and was awarded a PhD in Visual Anthropology by the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He worked in several international projects on ethnographic images and photographic archives.
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