Photo Kathmandu: War & peace

Photo Kathmandu 2016, the international photography festival in Nepal’s capital, is running its second edition, on from 21 October to 3 November.

Last year, in 2015, it was organized in the aftermath of major geological and political upheavals that had the country in tatters. The earthquake killed more than 9000 people in the country, rendered over 800,000 people homeless and caused extensive damage to cultural heritage. A few months later, the government fast-tracked a controversial constitution which set the Terai, the lower lying plains bordering India, on fire resulting in 49 deaths and an ensuing blockade that grinded the country’s economy to a halt.

In many ways, hosting an international photography festival at such a time might be seen as a particularly uphill fight; but it might also be seen as an act of cultural courage. NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, co-founder of Photo Kathmandu, says “It was a challenging time, but we felt because it was a challenging time, we all needed some inspiration and hope. And Nepal needed some positive media attention to rebuild the tourism industry after the earthquakes.”

This is an event that is careful to not merely cater to the usual suspects: an elite audience with cultural capital interacting within enclosed museum spaces. The exhibits are set up throughout the city of Patan, a lot of them in open public spaces, and facilitate an interaction with the people of the city, their history and national narratives.

There are 12 sites set up at various points along the narrow alleyways and courtyards of Patan city among it’s old-style Newari architecture, dense tenement buildings, its butcher shops and busy hole-in-the-wall eating places.

Photo Kathmandu is organized by photo.circle, a platform that, among other things, has been trying to digitally archive images that contribute towards a people’s history of Nepal. The Nepal Picture Library, set up in 2010, makes use of found images as well as individual submissions depicting local and personal histories of families and neighborhoods. The archive has grown to over 54,000 images, including studio photography by professionals as well as images captured by amateurs. Questions of identity, memory and history, and how they are represented, and by whom, are the spirit behind all these initiatives. In the inaugural edition, many photographs of Nepal and Nepalis taken over the past 50 years were exhibited to a wider Nepali public for the first time.

In a world saturated with images, where camera phones have made photographers and potential archivists of us all, it is worth slowing down to take stock of the media through which we see ourselves and how we got here. In a workshop called ‘The Past is the Present’ conducted by Pablo Bartholomew, participants thought through ways of connecting their personal lives to their familial and local histories. A resulting exhibition set up in Patan Dhoka, the gateway into Patan city, depicts a collage of photographs by the participants reflecting on their lives through selfies, old studio photographs of their families or their personal cameras. What emerges are fragments of a fractured history that allows people to locate themselves within the larger patterns of political forces that shape the life of a nation.

This year, broadly, the underlying theme uniting the different exhibitions is conflict and resilience. 2016 marks 20 years since the start of the Maoist conflict in Nepal that eventually gave way to the Comprehensive Peace Accord ten years later, marking the end of the monarchy and transition into representative democracy. One of the exhibitions, entitled Measures of Loss and Memory of War looks at photographs and documentation of this war and it’s afterlife, along with the civil wars that took place in Sri Lanka and India. The visual images of conflict in the three countries in the region raise questions about what role journalism and the media plays during war.

Indeed, war generates competing narratives and how it is represented is deeply political. Ishan Tankha, who has done significant work in Chhattisgarh first as a photojournalist on assignment for Indian newspapers and then later independently, in a panel discussion presented images that aimed at demystifying the standard representations of Maoist combatants that we are more used to in the mainstream media. His choice of photos tells a different story, showing the more prosaic daily life of the Maoists. For instance, he shoots the contents of a combatant’s bag, which does indeed have a gun, but also carries letters, pens and toothbrushes. This stands in stark opposition to photographs often staged for news cameras in which the young men and women stand wielding guns, adopting more threatening guerrilla-like postures. This refusal to simply add to the images that focus on the Maoists as dehumanized enemies of the state is one of the ways in which photography can be deployed to counter media narratives. This is similar to Sandra Calligaro’s collection Afghan Dream, also on display in this festival. Although Caligaro had gone to Kabul in the hope of becoming a war correspondent, her focus shifted on the everyday life of the people there, forming a counterpoint to the more widely consumed spectacle of conflict disseminated by the global media.

On the other hand, Iranian conceptual photographer Azadeh Akhlaghi’s work By an eye witness is pure dramatization. Her images are visually arresting, staging various moments in Iran’s history where assassinations or deaths took place but there were no cameras to document it. A former assistant director with the late filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, her photos assume a cinematic form. The people in each of these photographs are mostly actors, and she employs make-up artists and relies on extensive research and witness accounts to direct these images. Further, she uses iconic images of her country’s past and visual history to play around with her compositions, making the actors replicate some postures that are well known through images. Her work is particularly thought provoking as it radically disrupts the idea of photography as enabling ‘objective’ accounts that establish an unimpeachable truth.

The choice of spaces in which some of these exhibitions are displayed are provocative too. Jannatul Mawa, a Bangladeshi activist and photographer latest work Close Distance is currently exhibited inside a newly constructed mall in Patan. The photographs show women of various middle class households sitting next to their respective domestic help. Both women gaze at the camera and the level of social distance seems all too clear. Further, the placement of the photograph there comments on the space itself. Malls throughout South Asia, meant to mark a sense of modernity for its middle classes, has ensured a certain kind of privatization of public space in which only one class of people feel welcome to enter it.

Like its antecedent in the region, Chobi Mela in Bangladesh, Photo Kathmandu is bringing crucial questions about the historical value and politics of visual representation to the fore in the region, while honouring the integrity of the medium, its own conventions, limitations and demands. The collaborative, inclusive and self-reflexive approach displayed in the two years of its running marks it out as an important cultural event for both Nepal and South Asia.

Puja Sen is a Kathmandu-based journalist.