The Caravan's monthly Photo Essay feature enables image-based stories to be told with limited use of text.
Below are a small selection from the 15 photo essays I designed in my time at the publication.
This selection features works on difficult knowledge, feminist histories, gender narratives, and ecological shifts.
Spectres of Violence
Rohit Saha's "Spectres of Violence” features a selection of images from his photo book 1528, a work that attempts to construct the history of extrajudicial killings in Manipur, a state in Northeast India which has seen 60 years of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).
The act essentially grants special powers to the Indian Armed forces to maintain public order in ‘disturbed areas’, and has severely been criticised due to alleged misuses, and the immeasurable impact of its disturbance on civilian life in the region.
Through a variety of scans including newspaper clippings, official documents, scribbled notes, photographs of victims, and finally compounded with Saha's own photograps of the same sites where the killings took place, the work pieces together a troubled history.
About Time
The Feminist Memory Project’s official inception in April 2018 was premised on gender inclusivity by crowd-sourcing photographs of women in Nepal. The submissions were at first difficult to identify or place in historical context. As the project grew, followers and their family members were able to identify themselves, others, and locations which would have changed from when they were captured in frame.
Under the creative direction of its founder NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and its lead researcher and archivist Diwas KC Raja, the project evolved as a mission to free the past from the grips of economically and culturally dominant groups. What emerged is a vast archive of more than 8000 photographs that chronicle the history of Nepal's feminist movement, the personal lives of some of its key figureheads, as well as that of committees that sought to empower women.
An alternate layout of the photo essay was less viable, due to it partly being a chronicle of the movement, and also because the archive's founders had themselves borne the labour of sifting through the wealth of the imagery and classifying them to create a sense of cohesion between all the captured moments.
Therefore, here is a version of the layout where many of the same images can be seen as more emotional than chronological. The changing of the sequence and the selection helps put into context the pursuit for equality that Nepali feminists continue to fight for.
Breaking the Cycle
Bunu Dhungana’s “Breaking the Cycle” engages with aspects of womanhood considered taboo in her native place of Nepal. The work emphasises the subject of menstruation because of a cultural practice in Nepal called Chhaupadi, in which women, when menstruating, are required to live outside the home spaces due to patriarchal notions of impurity.
The work also engages with the pressure of marriage put on women, as well as the domestic violence they are subject to in romantic partnerships, and the consequent erasure of individual identity. Due to the breadth of the themes and the sensitive nature of the work, the design for the photo essay went through a significant number of iterations.
Each spread was dedicated to particular independent subjects, while the visual sequencing itself stitched the photographer's larger narrative of her meditation on patriarchal society's treatment of womanhood.
In place of captions, excerpts from conversations, informed by the photographer's background in sociology, were used.
Harboured Memories
Urmia—formerly the second-largest salt lake in West Asia—shrank by nearly 80 percent over thirty years. Although recent rainfall has helped the lake revive a little, the drying up was the result of drought triggered by climate change.
Climate change is central to Daryani’s work: she has explored the effect of water disputes with Afghanistan on Iran’s wetlands, as well as how the increasingly polluted Karun river impacts communities dependent on it. Daryani is compelled by how relationships between places and past events “shape human identity and provide memories that are a reservoir of pain and joy.”