Eyes wide open in Mustang

As a struggling photographer in Bhaktapur 30 years ago, Kishor Kayastha could not even afford furniture. Buying a new lens was out of the question.

Later, as one of Nepal’s top fashion and travel photographers, Kayastha toured the world, doing shoots in exotic places for famous brands. Money was not as much a limiting factor anymore.

Then came the accident. The shoot team was caught in a blizzard in Mustang in 2019, when Kayastha and the horse he was riding tumbled down a steep slope in whiteout conditions.

 “My whole life flashed before me,” he recalls, “I was filled with regret for all work I had not done. I suddenly realised all the money in the world cannot buy you life.

Miraculously, Kayastha survived and the near-death experience was an epiphany that changed the trajectory of his life. Since then, his photographs have a more dreamlike tone, the visuals documenting an observed reality but transcending it.

Which is why a visit to Kishor Kayastha’s ongoing exhibition of 30 ultra-wide panoramas at Nepal Art Council, MUSTANG: A Two-Decade Odyssey, feels like a pilgrimage to Mustang: it is the next best thing to being there oneself.

The high resolution prints are vast, some of them 6m wide, and do justice to Mustang’s big sky and the wrinkled, ochre terrain of this arid trans-Himalayan district.

Kayastaha has been going to Mustang at least four times a year for the past two decades, and the exhibition spans the time in which much has changed with the arrival of the highway, outmigration and climate breakdown. But a lot remains the same.

“I first went in 2004 mainly because I could not go to Tibet,” Kayastha relates. “And I found there is a Tibet in Nepal, too. Mustang has always been a refuge, a beyul, to escape the materialistic world of Kathmandu.”

 Kayastha, now 47, was born into photography. His parents owned a studio in Bhaktapur, and as a boy he helped his mother in the darkroom, dipping black and white prints into developers and fixers under a dim red light.

Today, everyone with a mobile device is taking pictures, but Kayastha believes photography is more relevant than ever: “Selfies have become selfish. Like they said that the invention of the camera would make paintings obsolete, photography is not going away either.”  

Anyone who has travelled north of Kagbeni, especially in the old days before Sumo jeeps replaced mule trains, will appreciate the tranquility of this windswept plateau where time stood still.

“The horizon is so wide, the sky so immense, the land so unending that Mustang makes you feel small in the scheme of things. It brings you down to size, both physically and spiritually,” Kayastha says.

The extra-wide prints were so big, even the Nepal Art Council’s walls could not accommodate all of them, so Kayastha had to scale some of the photographs down. The sheer size of the images evoke in visitors the finiteness of human existence in time and space. 

Kayastaha speaks to us as he unrolls a stitched panorama of Kagbeni he took in 2004. That image and another one taken from the same spot in 2024 serve as bookends at the exhibition, revealing through repeat photography the passage of time. Kagbeni’s monastery complex is now much bigger, there are new concrete buildings, and scars from the great flood last year that tore through town.

Yet, beyond and above the Kali Gandaki’s fossil-strewn banks, the russet brown folds in the rock strata remind us that in geological timescale human beings have been here for less than a millisecond of a camera’s shutter speed.

Kishor Kayastha’s exhibition forces us to think that Mustang’s fierce afternoon winds will keep sculpting its dyed organ pipe cliffs long after we are not here to see them. 

MUSTANG: A Two Decade Odyssey

by Kishor Kayastha

Till 14 January, 11AM-4PM

Nepal Art Council