‘NEPAL’ 1975-1988

Photographer Kevin Bubriski has been visually documenting the country and people of Nepal since his first visit in 1975. Sent as a young Peace Corps volunteer to the northwest Karnali Zone, the country’s remotest and most economically depressed region, he spent three years walking the length and breadth of the Karnali, planning and overseeing construction of gravity flow drinking water pipelines. He also photographed the local villagers, producing an extraordinary series of 35mm and large format black-and-white images.

A monsoon rain doesn’t deter the devout from witnessing a chariot ride by a young girl worshipped as a living goddess known as Kumari — derived from the word for “virgin.” Kathmandu, 1975.

In February of 1978 Nepal’s King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya arrived by helicopter at the remote mountain outpost town of Jumla where 70% infant mortality rates and perennial hunger was the way of life for most local people in that northwest region of Nepal.  In the faces of the locals one can see the look of surprise and reverence as the king and queen walk down the main street of town. I had taken a few photographs of the royal couple earlier in the morning and decided that the powerful picture was that of the crowd.

There, Rasuwa, Nepal 1976. A Tamang porter (an ethnic group living in the high middle hills of Nepal) takes a tobacco break at a teashop in the village of Thare during a monsoon downpour. Before the advent of the motorway in the 1980s, There was the midpoint in the two-day walk between Trisuli and Dhunche in the Rasuwa district, directly north of Kathmandu, and all goods had to be portered for several days on people’s backs.

Dumbara, Mugu, Nepal 1977. The village of Dumbara, in northwest Nepal’s Karnali region, was a community of Dalit “untouchable” families of the artisan castes of shoemakers, blacksmiths and tailors.  Many of the Dalit community were landless and worked as sharecroppers on the property of the landholders

A Buddhist shaman in a trance at sacred Gosaikunda Lake, 1988. A village boy soaks up the winter’s sun in Talphi village, 1977.

This gentleman was the self-proclaimed “global emperor.” The photo was taken in Tundikhel in 1985.

The villagers of Karkibada take to the rooftops to thresh and bag their harvest of winter barley and wheat. 1985

Candles are lit as part of a ritual to ward off bad karma during a festival in Bhaktapur in 1988. The ancient city in the Kathmandu Valley was hard hit by the 2015 April quakes.

 Barpak village, Gorkha, Nepal 1984 – epicenter of the April 25 2015 quake (all houses were destroyed). Girls of the Gurung ethnic group share a quiet moment before school starts in Barpark village in the Gorkha district, 1984.