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.
Kayastha 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.
