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.