An Unapologetic Mundane: Thinking about thinking with Sagar Chhetri

For Kathmandu-based documentary photographer Sagar Chhetri, the personal and political have been deeply intertwined since his childhood. Having grown up in Madesh (the southern belt of Nepal bordering India) in the 1990s, Chhetri’s introduction to understanding Nepal’s geography, the country’s socio-political scenario and his family’s history was through the images and photographs that he encountered in newspapers, television news, postcards and family albums. Through his work Eclipse (2015–ongoing), Chhetri has been responding to the conundrum of questions of identity among the local Madhesi community. These questions have emerged as a result of political transitions (mainly Madesh Movement and the Maoist uprisings) in Nepal and how their position in society continues to be one of the biggest fights for identity in his generation. In this interview, Chhetri speaks about workshops and people who have inspired him over the years, and the way these influences shaped the two bodies of work he created in 2020 in the midst of Nepal’s most stringent Covid-19 lockdown. 

Veeranganakumari Solanki (VS): You were a Visiting Artist Fellow at the Laxmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University in 2019, where you attended several critical theory courses. Soon after this, the world moved into the pandemic-necessitated lockdowns. Could you describe the impact this Fellowship had on your practice and the works you have created over the past two years?

Sagar Chhetri (SC): 2019 was a busy year, first with photo.circle’s workshops and then a lot of travel, ending with the Fellowship at Harvard. One of the courses I attended, “Critical Theory: Identity, Politics, and Practice” taught by Dr Houman Harouni, inspired me to consider “thinking” as a process. That course made me realise that unless we used our thoughts to comprehend the world, the world would pass by without us knowing it. The idea of thinking about what I think, and thereby consciously thinking further, has always been a part of my process and now even more so. I had planned to use 2020 as a year of reflection and slowing down in order to work on Eclipse again. However, due to the lockdown, I could not travel. So I ended up creating at home and around Kathmandu, while always consciously foregrounding this process of thinking.

VS: There has also been a shift in your work from Eclipse, where a community is in focus, to your work in 2020 that stems from a positioning of yourself in everyday situations in Kathmandu. Could you also speak about your process of working as part of a team at photo.circle in 2020 during the pandemic?

SC: The lockdown in Nepal was very strict and none of us could move out. We were all trying to improvise ways of working from home. It crippled many of us, who were so used to going to photo.circle to work. In the beginning it was okay, but then it began to hurt. Then, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati (co-founder of photo.circle) gathered a team of freelance journalists and photographers. We started thinking about how we could react to and record this strange collective experience of the pandemic. We documented the pandemic’s effects and adopted the role of a newsroom on Instagram. We also resumed the Nepal Photo Project, which was set-up on the second day of April 2015’s massive earthquake in Nepal to document the situation on the ground. Apart from Instagram as the primary outlet for these stories, we also made a website to feature work created by the fifteen visual storyteller fellows.

VS: Could you talk about your engagement and fairly active sharing of images on your personal Instagram account?

SC: I look at the act of photographing as remembering time for the future and also as something that will help me understand myself better. Parallel to my work at photo.circle, I was documenting my everyday life depending on the time, the police and lockdown-related restrictions. Often I would get held up at holding centres for breaking curfew rules, since I did not have an official press card. But the absence of being tied to a single media agency also gave me a sense of freedom. I could choose where to go, where to stop and I could photograph anything I felt like. I usually take a lot of pictures on my phone or my DSLR. During the lockdown too, I took pictures of everything around me, on my evening walks and sometimes day-long wanderings. I would come home, edit my pictures and post the ones that I felt the most connected with on that day on Instagram. This helped me to stay connected with my friends and the outside world, with whom I otherwise had no contact. It was a struggle.

Though these may seem mundane now, some day—maybe ten or fifteen years later—they will be a reminder of these incredibly strange times we lived through. The images are my continuous way of reflecting on a process of thinking.

VS: This presence of online images and the idea of a digital archive is also something that you explored with your work (Sorry for that!) (2020), which you created during the Joop Swart Masterclass 2020. How did you arrive at creating a work that was based purely on digitally sourced and manipulated images?

SC: I was initially keen to expand my work on Nepal’s Maoist civil unrest between 1996–2006. On hearing about my nervousness to go out during the restrictions, one of my mentors at the Masterclass, Candice Jansen, tried to motivate me to resist and go out in a manner similar to those revolutionaries whose stories I was keen to explore. I tried to clandestinely photograph, however after a few weeks I realised the work demanded me to travel beyond Kathmandu to visit libraries/archives and meet people, which was impossible.

Instead, I landed at the vast knowledge deposit—the World Wide Web. I started thinking back to my childhood memories of looking at images of politicians shaking hands on the cover of magazines, newspapers and media. I always wondered what it was about these events that made so many photographers gather to take hundreds of images of the same people in just this one moment. Then, I became a photographer and realised that I too was taking hundreds of images but of different things. Another aspect that influenced this work was a statement that Prof. Alan Hill (from RMIT University, Australia) had made during a workshop I was a part of titled “Doing Visual Politics,” which was a collaboration between several Australian Universities, Pathshala and photo.circle in December 2018. He had spoken about how the internet that lay between the public and the private archive would be a dilemma for art historians. This inspired me to work only with digital images in (Sorry for that!). So, I scouted the internet, gathered and manipulated images of politicians shaking hands and derived my title from a part of the audio I used for this multimedia work. In his statement, the chairman of the Nepali Maoist group states, “Sorry for that, for the lives that were lost… Sorry for that!”

 

Sagar Chhetri, (sorry For that), 2020, Video courtesy: Sagar Chhetri and World Press Photo