Description
| Book Title | Juju Bhai Dhakhwa – A Keeper of Memories |
| Language | English and Nepali |
| Number of pages | 68 pages |
| ISBN | 9789937016292 |
| Dimensions | 170mm X 215 mm |
| Country of Origin | Nepal |
| Edition | 1st |
| Print Run | 1000 |
| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Published by | photo.circle |
Through an endearingly personal lens, the Juju Bhai Dhakhwa Collection shows the community of Nagbahal, in Patan, responding to political and economic changes in the country and around the world. Dhakhwa’s photos capture the communal alongside the familial; a chorus of faces that repeat throughout the collection shows the fluid intersection between the private realm of the family and the public realm of festivities and excursions. His propensity for experimentation and documentation of his own life and lives around him provides a record of the transformation of the community as shaped by the political and economic transformation of the country.
To this day, Nagbahal remains at the centre of many religious festivities unique to the city of Patan. Even as trade and education brought new ideas from around the world, the inherited preoccupation around practices of Buddhism required the people to remain rooted and loyal to tradition. Dhakhwa’s photographs capture the tension between steadfast tradition and spontaneous changes in the lives of the people of Nagbahal, and of the space itself: here, we find early evidence in Nepal of the camera relaxing around its subjects, and vice versa. Alongside formal studio portraits we also find mischief in the outdoors. Alongside the solemnity of sacred ritual we find celebration of the mundane. A pilgrimage is also occasion for a picnic; and thus, a microcosm is magnified.
We are indebted to Dhakhwa’s equanimity—or ubiquity—in capturing the immense and the minute, the specific and the vast, the solemn and the strange, because through this wide reach we become better acquainted with a community journeying between the old and the new.
