Hotel/Home: An Interview with Tenzing Dakpa

Photographer Tenzing Dakpa’s photo series The Hotel, published as a photobook by Steidl in 2020, is a quiet reflection on the multiple realities that form one’s idea of home. A second-generation Tibetan in exile, Dakpa was born in Gangtok, Sikkim, and his childhood home was a hotel that his parents run even today. He grew up in a space that was both a business and a home, simultaneously transient and permanent. This duality became a part of Dakpa’s identity. He was the only member to move away from his family’s business and from Sikkim, choosing instead to study abroad and live in other parts of India. During a long visit home after several years of being away, Dakpa found himself engaged in a photographic dialogue with elements from his childhood home: his family and their new pet cat, the physical contours of the hotel, the everyday tasks that constitute a business, the mountainous terrain of a small town in Northeast India, etc. The Hotel presents itself like a family album of sorts, an intimate archive that raises questions of memory, identity and home.

In a two-part interview with Ketaki Varma, Dakpa talks about the making of this series and the subsequent photobook. The first segment explores the series’ origins, the complex notions of identity that are a part of Dakpa’s practice and how the pandemic has affected the way he looks back at this series and his hotel-home in Gangtok.

Ketaki Varma (KV): Tell us about the making of your photo series The Hotel (2018), which was published as a photobook by Steidl in 2020.

Tenzing Dakpa (TD): The Hotel came about from my thesis project for the MFA Photo Programme at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Up until then, all my explorations and previous projects dealt with themes of migration, realities of diaspora settlements and the politics of displacement and identity among young Tibetans. I was drawn towards spaces of comfort where dialogues of alienation could be played out. The deeper I delved into this, the more I felt that a stake in survival was far more immediate than analysing power structures—narratives of being a refugee and cultural romanticisation appeared to be disempowering.

Coming from my own dislocation—introduced by an unrelenting movement for education and opportunity—I wanted to photograph my parents at work and the space that they built. I wanted to take stock and describe for myself an origin; to activate and conjure, embrace and acknowledge the history of the diaspora and its manifestations; and make this work in the most idiosyncratic and personal yet ambiguous way possible.

KV: In a video about the book, you mentioned that this series made you think about the question of identity—who you are and who your family is. Could you tell us a little more about how it plays out in this series?

TD: In the series, there is a photograph of a poster hanging on a wall with a window to its right and a frame of the Potala Palace to its left.

The poster depicts a caricature of a man squatting, squeezing his head through his thighs to face his backside. The text above it reads: “Get to know yourself.” I grew up looking at this poster, and I found my family and myself making things work with that sense of humour. For me, the poster points at the idea of introspection and the privilege of investing effort in getting to know yourself.

I believe photographs are a proxy to a realm where gestures, proximity, vantage and description operate simultaneously to create a larger whole. In the case of The Hotel—by photographing the space and activities in the premises—the intent is not to understand but to meet half-way, to resonate in order to get a sense of the things we live with. I wanted to organise that idea through a sequence of photographs—and have the photographs do what they do best: describe without any external means of attachment, letting the pictures sing for themselves.

The reason I enjoy making photographs is that I am never certain of what I am going to get. Part of the joy is also that they confound and embody more than one knows. I was recently thinking about portraits and how a measure of a good portrait is its ability to perhaps embody a reflection of the (photographer’s) self in the image. But to add to that, with time, the self is going to change and perhaps, along with it, also the way the photograph will read or look back at you. 

KV: I wonder if you could elaborate on the conflict between the public and private that is at the core of the work: the idea of the hotel being both a business and your childhood home, a place of both transience and permanence. Also, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic over the past eighteen months, industries like the hotel business have been impacted. We have seen how the idea of “home” has changed in different ways for different people. I wonder if you visualise this dichotomy somewhat differently now...

TD: A frequent observation I get from those who have seen the work is that guests seem to be missing in the work, apart from just suggestions of a presence. I consciously decided to photograph my parents at work—cleaning, repairing, maintaining and rendering the space—akin to what a guest would experience when they visit.

With the onset of the pandemic and industries across the country shutting down, we have noticed a huge segment of the population returning home. The motivations for the pictures in The Hotel begin with that arrival—with my own experience of being away from the hotel and beginning to reconcile with the space that I grew up in. The feeling of estrangement collapses over time and familiarity starts to set in. Leaving your family home and then returning to it as someone new or changed is a feeling we wrestle with and can all relate to. The core of the work brushes with the idea of sustenance and space. Its significance is made possible through an engagement where our collective experiences can play out.

To read the second part of this interview, please click here.

All images courtesy of Tenzing Dakpa.