The lab is still open, but now it caters to a very small photographic community. “Mostly foreigners come here now,” says Kiran Man Chitrakar, the elder son of Ganesh Man Chitrakar who currently runs the lab. Among four brothers, the eldest, Pushpa Man Chitrakar is also a fellow photographer. The second and fourth children, Triloyka and Arun Man Chitrakar are influential personalities in the hotel and engineering industries respectively.
The Chitrakar family is known for being the official photographers of the now defunct Royal Court of Nepal. From the time of the Ranas up until the reign of king Gyanendra, the Chitrakar family was at the forefront of Royal photography in Nepal. It was only in the early 1950s, when Nepal began to open up to the international community, that Ganesh Man joined hands with USAID and became the first Nepali man to begin taking aerial photographs of Nepal. It was after this that Ganesh Man began focusing his energies on the further development of his photo lab. Ganesh Photo Lab thus became the first and only outlet for color slide development in Nepal.
For a place with such a celebrated past, it seems unfortunate that when asked for a tour of the lab and its darkroom, an uneasy Kiran Man says, “No one has been inside for more than 15 days, it’s probably very dusty.”
The owner is very nostalgic and speaks of days when the “dark room would be busy for 12 or 13 hours a day.” The remnants of traditional photography still lie there, covered in cloths and unused. A Federal enlarger from the 1940s which his grandfather used and a Durst enlarger from the 1960s owned by his father have become nostalgic loose ends from the lab’s heydays.
Currently, Ganesh Photo Lab is the only studio that develops exclusively black and white prints. It caters to a very specific clientele, but serves mostly as a museum of sorts, exemplifying the history of photography in Nepal. Ironically, this is precisely what is in store for the future of the lab. The owner is eager to develop Nepal’s very first photographic museum and gallery.
As for the digital age, the lab owner says “It’s good in one sense, but difficult in another. You have to buy a camera, and then a computer and make sure your systems are in order. It’s very complicated to maintain.”
He also speaks of his genuine concern over copyright issues brought to surface by this new digital era. Having said this, Kiran Man is himself actively engaged in digitizing images taken by his father and grandfather, attempting to create an archive of their work and to keep the fruits of his lab up-to-date with the modern age of digital photography. The fate of Ganesh Photo Lab lies now in Kiran Man’s daughter, who is currently undertaking a degree in Visual Anthropology at Bard College in the USA.
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