A famous dentist
The first anniversary of the 25 April 2015 earthquake in Nepal is imminent. It will come with commemorations, civil and religious events, all sorts of speeches and calls on symbols, which will undoubtedly generate numerous images. This is the occasion to reassess the motives, the stakes and the meanings of the representations of such an event.
In Lalitpur in November 2015, during the miraculous six days of the first edition of Photo Kathmandu festival, in a cul-de-sac that gives onto Swotha, a square where not so long ago there stood a temple dedicated to Radha Krishna that the earthquake literally rooted out of its base, I got to know Teru Kuwayama, a photojournalist and a photography advisor at Instagram.
Absent from the social networks and ignorant of their functioning, I took pleasure in listening to Teru’s explanations about what Instagram is, what the use of this application is, what benefits, satisfactions, enrichment or knowledges does it bring to its users, how pictures are shown there, how they are seen, edited, selected, combined, what is the logic underlying this organisation, etc. (a logic that, besides, has just changed, as recalled Jörg Colberg in one of his latest pieces (1)).
The main argument put forward by Teru in favour of the tool managed by his employers is that it allows each and every of its users to address four hundred millions potential readers. My contradictory argument was and remains that I am not convinced that I wish, neither that I would be able, to address such a large number of people, given how hard it is already for me to understand how a conversation works when it involves more than three speakers.
And assuming that I’d go there, I would address so many people to tell them what? I asked Teru. To show them my photographic work? No, Teru replied: to show them what is around your work, what you do in between the pictures. You take the time to photograph what is around with your phone, and you show it on Instagram to make the reader want to come and watch your work on your website. Well, I’m not sure that what is around my work would make anyone want to look at that work, given how trivial these moments are. And first of all, I am not certain that I want to show these moments, even less to one twentieth of the human population. What is around my work, that is my life, nourishing the work and making it possible – as well as being nourished by the work and made possible by it. What is around my work, that is my life, dissolving in the work, and in the meantime absorbing it. That process of fusion is required for the precipitate that are my photographs to arise. A material that is then re-injected in the cycle. In reality there is no such thing as “something around my work”. There is life. And life precedes photography. If I am not there, if there is no life, there cannot be photography either. Yet if each gesture becomes subject to an order of “having to be photographed”, where would life still happen? So no, indeed, I will not go on Instagram. And at all events, my phone doesn’t come with a built in camera.
This said, the usage of Instagram the way Teru presented it is not the only one permitted. The application is not only destined to be a tool for self-propaganda. If you think about its possibilities when it comes to the representations of a disaster like the earthquake, you may get a broader vision of the tool that is in my opinion more human and potentially more interesting.
The Nepal Photo Project was launched as early as 26 April, the day after the seism, on the initiative of Tara Bed, an Indian writer and curator, Sumit Dayal, an Indian photographer who grew up in Nepal, and five members of photo.circle, including NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Bhushan Shilpakar, its founders, as well as photographers Kishor Sharma, Sagar Chhetri and Shikhar Bhattarai (2).
Its existence at the peak of the crisis brought documentation, knowledge and information that were useful to the coordination of relief assistance and to the search for missing persons. This would not have been possible before the digital age and without the commitment of these people. In the photographs of the Nepal Photo Project, the distance to the other, to the event and to the photographer has a pertinence that simply looks instinctive. This is obviously not here about serving any personal ambition. Each image looks as if it was taken with the camera in one hand and the other one generously open, the rest of the body and the soul obstinately striving to survive and to help others to survive, to rebuild lives and to help others to rebuild lives. Parallel with the photographic project, that very team of photo.circle also proceeded to compensate as much as possible the desistance of the Nepalese government in the immediate post-quake period by organising themselves, with the help of their large network and of many volunteers, an efficient distribution of emergency aid in the villages of the Kathmandu valley that had been isolated by the disaster. As we approach the first anniversary of the earthquake, the Nepal Photo Project has continued to be a place for sharing stories, for understanding the reality as well as for action, like with the spreading of the hashtag #whereisgon (where is Government of Nepal?) on Instagram. It is furthermore not surprising that at the origin of these projects there is NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, for whom action is indissociable from thinking. This young woman makes me think of some budding Nepalese Simone Weil, driven by a strength, a commitment and a lucidity that reach far beyond the promotion of photography and encompass the fate of the whole country. The radical and humanistic vision that motivates her is a source of inspiration the kind of which you seldom meet in your life.
In the Nepal Photo Project, in this specific, local, modest and determined combination of action and documentation, I see a possible starting point to look deeper into an issue that arose one morning in our conversations with Teru Kuwayama: why did Time Magazine send James Nachtwey to Nepal, one of the most famous photographers in the world, a few days after the seism, to cover the catastrophe. (3)
I should right away dispel any misunderstanding here: I do respect the work of James Nachtwey. I don’t happen to know him neither anyone working for the Time Magazine, and I don’t have any particular grievance against that photographer, that newspaper or any of its staff members. Moreover, I have said, written and photographed on more than one occasion what binds me to Nepal. Finally, through a lot of patience and readings, I guess that I’have slowly started to more or less understand what a photograph is, especially a photograph taken there.
Hence I can but assess the mediocrity of the images taken by James Nachtwey to honour that assignment in a Nepal in ruins. Their existence and the conditions of their recording are deplorable. These are the images of someone who in these particular circumstances has not taken the time to be compassionate enough to remain a human being despite being a photographer. I don’t know the reasons of this failure and of this specific lack of time. James Nachtwey maybe doesn’t know them either, but I am sure that he feels them. The absence of the photographer to what he is picturing dominates this series of images. They are weak and visually inconsistent. They tell no story, neither do they show any intimate perception of the world. Brilliant sometimes, they lack poverty. James Nachtwey pictures Nepal in ruins as a traveler in quiet times pictures sadhus and prayer flags or any of these human affairs that have to be seen abroad: as attractions. He fails to leave himself behind and keeps focusing on his idea of what this now devastated country should look like. He fails to look at the Other as someone who exists outside of himself. He fails to conceive and to formulate the Other as such, as what she/he is, rather than as how he wishes that she/he looks like. He pictures the Other so as to distance himself from her/him, or at the very least by doing so. Let’s not even talk about conceiving the Other as similar: as someone who might be closer to us than we think, allowing an empathy to arise that would be independent from the testimony. Yet in these images I feel that he would have liked to take other kinds of pictures in Nepal, but that he couldn’t. It looks like he didn’t accept the ambiguity of his own journey.
In an interview with Christian Caujolle published in the book The Walls don’t speak, photographer Jean-Robert Dantou refers to a psychiatrist who explained to him that in the hospital where she works “residents and carers have 97% common humanity and 3% differences, and it is up to each person to pick up what they want”. I think that between the photographing person and the one who is being photographed, the same applies. The problem is that the 3% differences are at first glance the most visible. Reaching these hidden 97% of common humanity is maybe impossible, because of what Victor Segalen names “an eternal incomprehensibility” (4). Even more impossible when the person who is being photographed is in a situation of crisis. Even more impossible again when the photographing person has delineated the place in advance that the person who is being photographed is going to be assigned in his “subject”. But this might not be true. These 97% are maybe within heart range. In any case, I think that we need to attempt to reach them, despite photography.
But when James Nachtwey was taking his pictures, many Nepalese and foreigners, professional or amateur photographers, or simple people with a smartphone, had already uploaded pictures that were far more informative than James Nachtwey’s on the Instagram feed of the Nepal Photo Project and elsewhere. And furthermore these pictures were coming from their guts and from their heart, showing the right empathy towards the sufferings of their brothers and sisters.
Take Narendra Shrestha for instance. In a panel dedicated to discuss the representations of the earthquake organised during Photo Kathmandu festival in 2015, he narrated with the most human and simple words what it had been for him to be a photojournalist, a husband and a father all at once when the earth started to shake. You had to be devilishly mineral to refrain from crying when listening to his story, his wrench, his consternation and his indecisiveness when it came to know where he would be the most useful: near his daughter and spouse who were stuck on the vacillating rooftop of his house, near the victims buried under the rubble that he met down in the street, or behind his viewfinder busy doing his job.
It is really not about criticising a particular photographer or newspaper, but it is well about wondering what need does the decision meet to fly in one of the most famous photographers in the world for such a brief period of time to cover a dramatic event in a country that he hardly knows – if he knows it at all, for what we can guess from the text accompanying his portfolio on the Time’s website: “Nepal is a place I’ve long wanted to visit, not so much as a journalist, but to see the mountains and the temples.” (5)
Did the chief editor of the Time send James Nachtwey to Nepal then for all of the following reasons:
– because he considers that it is his duty to provide his readers with the most correct, pertinent and complete information possible about the disaster, and in the meantime to make sure that the presence of his journalist on the field will have the least harmful impact possible on the coordination of the relief efforts and on the available resources for the survivors;
– because he knows that his readers have had the opportunity to appreciate the human qualities, the ability to cope with critical situations and the photographic skills of James Nachtwey thanks to previous reportages published in his paper and elsewhere;
– finally, because he also is confident in the ability of James Nachtwey to produce meaningful images of a difficult situation, and in the capacity of his newspaper to utilise at best the skills of its contributors, on the basis of what he estimated that this photographer was the best placed to witness the complexity of this event, and because he is convinced that his readers will acknowledge the fact that he did the right choice to inform them correctly ?
Or did he do it just to have a chance to display the name of James Nachtwey in his pages and by doing so to notify:
– his rival newspapers that the Time can afford to work with such a famous photographer as James Nachtwey;
– his publishing director that he sent the best guy possible on that crisis situation;
– other photographers what they should aim if they want to work for them?
This is what Teru answered to that question: “a famous photographer is like a famous dentist: he’s only famous among the participants to dentistry colloquia”.
I hadn’t expected that. I’ve been thinking about this sentence regularly since then.
The first thing that this answer meant for me, and that I hadn’t seen when I was outraged by the process by which this important magazine dispatched this (famous-among-photographers) photographer on the field of that disaster, moreover to do a bad job, it is that the chief editor of the Time maybe simply checked who was available these days among his contract photographers, it was James Nachtwey, so he sent him to Nepal because it is their job to send and to be sent, without any further question. Maybe.
But then this is maybe time to raise a few questions? Maybe this process is no longer acceptable? Maybe those days are behind us when magazines considered that they could only task photographers like James Nachtwey, preferably flown in from the antipodes, to produce trustworthy visual information? Isn’t there indeed something rather pedantic in perpetuating that kind of relationship with the Other and the Elsewhere? Or, to put it in another way, in this continued endeavour to tack an external discourse onto the Elsewhere that self-justifies itself in its own circuits of distribution, isn’t there something a bit too close to the approach of someone like Pierre Loti, to name a writer at the exact opposite of Segalen (and in the meantime steering clear of using some too historically connoted adjective)? This is no longer the twentieth century when these circuits, because of the distance that separated them form the Elsewhere, could give their actors the illusion to be protected from the effects of their discourse in the Elsewhere – provided that it ever arrived so far – and to be exempted from ever being held accountable for it. The places for the dissemination of information are now available to everyone, whatever the place it talks about, wherever the people who produce it come from, and wherever its reader reads it from. This is the twenty-first century. Back to Instagram.
The comparison between the series by James Nachtwey and the images of the Nepal Photo Project shows that if the actual concern of the chief editor of Time had to inform his readers, it would have been wiser of him to let James Nachtwey work on his personal projects rather than flying him to Nepal. With the money spared, Time could have hired Kishor, as well as Sagar and Shikhar, who were already there as I already mentioned. They are all excellent photographers, very capable of writing well-informed captions, and they do not need anybody to tell them where to go to document what requires to be documented in Nepal. All the more so as Time also published an article about Nepal Photo Project at the time. So the chief editor knew about it. He knew the names. He just needed to call them rather than adding a mouth to feed in the capital. That would have been the sign of an excellent knowledge of the field and its actors, of a senses of responsibilities in a territory facing a situation of crisis, and of a considerable editorial courage. Well, no. James Nachtwey. I don’t understand the approach. From my point of view, as a reader of images and as a human being linked to that country, the only positive outcome of his journey to Kathmandu for Time Magazine was that Kishor got a few days of well-paid job because he was smart enough to be his fixer. But that’s it.
The ensuing question raised by Teru’s answer is: nearly two hundred years after the invention of photography, what it the place of its creators outside of the photographic sphere? One cannot say: “a famous writer is like a famous dentist”. If you ask one hundred people in the streets of a middle sized town in France, well, I bet that all will be able to name a writer that the deem famous, be it Victor Hugo, Guillaume Musso, Arthur Rimbaud or Patrick Modiano. But a photographer? Two people will maybe name Henri Cartier-Bresson or Yann Arthus-Bertrand, rather the other way round. It will be easier for most people to name a painter. To these one hundred people, the name of James Nachtwey will sound as unknown as the one of Dr Soulier, my dentist. Maybe this is because humanity has been painting and writing for millennia, and that we have only taken pictures for less than two hundred years. I don’t know. Does it say something about the maturity of photography and of the people who work with it? Will there be a time when this will no longer be true, and when a famous photographers will be famous out of photographic circles, and does it matter if this time ever comes or not? I don’t know either. Meanwhile, this is a lesson in humility, too.
However, there are limits to dental surgery that are not the ones of photography. Even when produced by people whose name only interests a hundred or a thousand persons on Earth, it is the language of the century. Omnipresent and nearly omnipotent. It can be a tool for understanding the world as well as a tool for dissolving the meaning. Here too, it is up to each and every one to use it the way she or he wants. On Instagram only, seventy million images are uploaded daily (6) All are probably not driven by the same humanistic motives as the one gathered by the Nepal Photo Project. One can very well decide not to take part to this flux. One can even consider urgent to deny it, which is sometimes tempting. But it is also possible to assume that, in much the same way as the Nepal Photo Project, all are maybe not necessarily noise. In this way of appropriating and utilising Instagram as a tool for inventing vectors for information escaping the traditional circuits but nevertheless reaching their audience, there might be a beginning of an answer to to questions that James Nachtwey allowed me to raise so far in this text. By the way, this hasn’t gone unnoticed to Instagram itslelf which, as Teru explained, feeds its own Instagram account with editorial choices operated by actors coming from the photographic sphere. Which made Teru assert that Instagram could now be regarded as the largest magazine in the world. Yet if now the choice of the contents is no longer made by the user but by algorithms, there is a risk that it becomes a totalitarian magazine that will sooner or later fade away. As shown by Jörg Colberg in the above mentioned article, it will then be, or it might already be, necessary for the user to either follow the movement and go for the next application, or to express and inform oneself from a place where one keeps control over one’s thought.
Finally, to be honest and complete, I should make something clear. After the seism, once the workshop participants whom I was responsible for had reached home alive, on 28 and 29 April I also realised a series of photographs in the villages in the South of Kathmandu Valley. These images are the only thing I was capable of once the earth stopped shaking. I did attempt at the time to say something about the contradictions of their recording. However, this current piece is in no way induced by their fortune or misfortune in the photographic sphere, neither by my opinion about it, nor by any sort of comparison with the work of James Nachtwey or anyone else. I don’t claim at all to have done something better than him or anybody else. When I say “better” I mean: not in terms of images but in terms of gesture and of legitimacy of the gesture. It might even be that my images and the gestures accompanying them were and remain as vain and indecent as Nachtwey’s, or as the images of all those who, like us, looked down at these ruins with eyes that would soon flee, carried away by their body flying back home, from where they would continue to look at Nepal trough the inert filter of a television set or a computer screen.
One larger question remains, that goes beyond the relative fame of a particular photographer and the more or less honest choices made by a particular magazine. It comes under the motives of documentary imaging as I put it in the beginning of this text: what could be the necessity and the reasons for which this disaster, any disaster, absolutely any situation, on the sole pretext of their existence or their occurrence, become, mechanically, potentially to be documented? There are cases where the answer to this question is clear, where the document asserts its sovereign power with no excess, where it subtly reveals that without it something would be missing for everyone: the readers, the photographer and the actors. The fact that human beings who are forced to live in the disaster produce a vision of this experience that is meant to be as positive as possible in order to comfort themselves and to help each other to overcome the difficulties, I do understand it. I find it beautiful. Courageous. Honourable. And the outcome is a powerful document. I also know, to take another example, a documentary film director who spends her creation time to step aside and to give the Other a chance to speak, without seeing her or him as “the attraction” of her research field. This being said, the word “documenting”, heard or read from many contemporary photographers, seems to be pronounced as if it was a guarantee for them to be the bearers of a necessarily useful word, a word beyond all suspicion and thus never debated. In this case the meaning and the necessity hardly transpire. And this does not only apply to photographers form here traveling to there (wherever here and there are). As photographers, we are all perfectly capable to consider as “having to be documented” situations that fall within our immediate daily environment. But does the world wish to be documented by us? Must there really be a documentary equivalent to any human situation for the sole reason that a photographer eventually came to know about its existence? Do we really need to tack our vision of the world and our idea of beauty on each and every bit of reality?
Because for the best part of it, what is documentary photography really about, if not about turning a problem into something beautiful? And if it is not about a problem, exoticism is not far away (7). And if it is not about beauty, at least it is about strength, subtlety, intelligence, intelligibility, etc. which sooner or later goes back to a certain idea of what beauty is. So this is about producing something beautiful and, notwithstanding the personal investment and however honest it might be, despite the pretext of being a witness, about soon producing it for yourself. For your pleasure, your satisfaction, your ego, your career strategy. And if it doesn’t happen when you take the pictures, how can you stave it off when comes what nearly all photographers will consider as a luck: the opportunity to show the pictures – in a book, an exhibition, a festival – or the reward for having taken them? Do we have to stave it off anyway? It might be a silly aspiration. But at least the question deserves to be raised.
Let’s take an extreme example that also deals with the representation of the Other in a suffering condition, but with a degree of connivance and empathy in no way comparable to the volatile voyage of James Nachtwey in Nepal. In À jeudi 15 heures (“see you next Thursday at 3pm”, a book that, unlike its French-only title seems to indicate, is bilingual) photographer Steeve Iuncker follows the slow decline of Xavier, who was suffering with HIV AIDS, until Xavier dies. They meet ninety-five times, Thursday after Thursday, with the understanding that each time Steeve would photograph Xavier, Xavier would also photograph Steeve. This is one of the most moving photography books that I know. Only photography, and its dialogue with words, could accomplish such a high level of conciseness and power, and in the same time, of simplicity. Morally, it is very clear. Steeve wanted to follow the progression of someone towards death. Xavier accepted to play that role for Steeve. This consent suffers no ambiguity. It’s their concern, to both of them. I find it admirable and moving that Steeve dared to solicit it and that Xavier granted it. Nevertheless this human adventure, at the time of being transposed into a book, albeit a necessary and a masterful one, even though it had been wished so by Xavier who is now dead, changes status. It becomes an object that is going to contribute not only to the liberation of the artist but also to the construction of his public image, and from which he could even yield a profit, however small this might be. I believe that Steeve Iuncker did settle this issue, that in brief amounts to taking a personal advantage out of the representation of someone else’s pain. Xavier and him did certainly make sure that the contract binding them be the clearest possible for both of them in this regard. (Darcy Padilla’s work about Julie Baird raises a similar question for me). As for me, I haven’t resolved that question. I’m not able to. If I was the author of these photographs and if that relative success happened to me, I would be petrified. This is not a value judgement. I’m not pretending that these works pose a moral problem in the absolute. I only say that the documentary photographer is being confronted with the distortion of her/his relationship to the Other that is induced by the public existence of the representation that he/she produces of that Other, and by the advantage that he/she takes out of it. This book is a nice example of the complexity and the intimacy of that confrontation. Personally, I haven’t managed to think of a contract with the Other that be clear and egalitarian enough to allow me to deal with that confrontation – even in the case when I assume that the Other did wish that the work becomes public, even if he or she asked for it or set it as a condition, and even if I know that the photographer did take all precautions for the Other, with the greatest respect. Yet this work seems to me is essential, because even if I am not able to imagine the contract underlying it, I am sure that it exists, and this book is a precious document about what we all have ahead of us. But then, what happens when there is not contract? Or when it is unidirectional, like when James Nachtwey pictures the cremations at Pashupatinath, as about all travellers before him have done for five or six decades?
To go back to other images that were made too quickly, if my photographs of the earthquake had brought me more that a few compliments, which was already difficult to accept, if that destruction had made me earn my living at some point, I would be paralysed. Compliments for the portrait of the monk Panna Sara on the very place where his mother just died? On what grounds? I should have kept it for myself! But I haven’t done so… Because of an unclear contract? None of my photographs taken during these days were ever driven by the necessity, the possibility, the illusion, the dream, the absurdity to make “good pictures” or to tell “a strong story”. I just did what I could for the Earth to stop shaking inside of me. As for the project of earning some money out of them, it frightens me. My agency tried. That’s their job. But with regard to the earthquake in Nepal, this is none of my concern (though it ought to be). I shouldn’t even have given them the authorisation to try. And even if it is not about suffering, the idea to turn my photograph of the Other into an element of the construction of myself remains problematical. I sometimes manage to overcome this problem by accepting my contradictions or by sweeping them away for lack of courage to approach them, but it remains present. Take at random Farzaneh’s portrait in l’Usure du Monde, that people like very often. There are moments when I wonder by what right I published it there, in that book, on this website. If Farzaneh no longer wants to have that image as a representation of herself, what can she do? Well, she sends me an email, and I’ll do what I can, but for the book it is too late, and not everyone would consider such a demand. The same applies to the monk Panna Sara: if one day my online picture prevents him from mourning his mother who died right under his feet, how will he do? He’d require a lot of tenacity to find me.
There is maybe a link that I lost, something blatant that I no longer see. Maybe this is just misplaced guilt. Contrariwise, these questions are maybe important. I don’t know. What I know is that they are there and they take up all the room. Today, a project like “documenting post-quake reconstruction” in Nepal, as VU’ Agency recently proposed me, no longer clings to any justification nor meaning. Anyway, they retracted because the client found someone on the spot. Il hope that this is Kishor, or Shikhar, or Sagar, or Prasiit, or Uma, or Karma, or Nirman or any of these so talented kids. Because if I had to go, I don’t have the slightest idea of what this would mean or what I should do. Whatever the subject, I will always be only able to give my vision of it, and then to propose it to a reader, provided that I accept its need as a public word. That vision will never be the document of what is or what was. It will always be nothing more than the document of what I saw and understood, which remains much limited with respect to what the one who lives the situation will have seen and understood, and much limited again with respect to what the reader will see and understand. “Documenting” doesn’t mean anything. There only exists degrees of honesty of what is being said.
I ask James Nachtwey for his forgiveness in advance, but it seems to me that an approach driven by these words highlighted on his website can only be at once extremely naïve and complacent: “I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.” Well, who does he think he is when he proclaims such an injunction? We always forget. The towers of hundreds of thousands skulls that Tamerlane erected at the gates of the central asian cities that he conquered in the fourteenth century are forgotten. Maybe not as a historical fact, but as a tragedy. Everything recurs. The edification of oneself backed up by words asserting the opposite is a deceit.
It might then be that the only option is fiction. Like Michael Ackerman did in Varanasi, to name a classic. At least he is not subjugated by the project of telling the story of the Other, who actually didn’t ask for it. He is doing his own work, however violent it might be. I have much less trouble to cope with the violence of that work than with the kindness of most of the documentary photography that I see these days. “This or that happens and needs to be told”. No. We are alive. You are alive. No one knows why. We need to deal with that. Whatever we do, be it something selfish or altruist, it is but a way of occupying the time that was bestowed to us in this life.
And somehow, one year after having survived the earthquake, whatever selfish or altruist we will do, whatever we will celebrate, whatever the symbols on which we will call, whatever the images that we will draw out of it, it will never be anything else than a more or less vain attempt to accept that once again we fell through the cracks, unlike nine thousand human beings. Nothing more than a way to wonder: why us, and not them?
(1) Jörg M. Colberg, “A renewed case for blogging”,Conscientious Photography Magazine, 21 March 2016, available online at:http://cphmag.com/blogging/.
(2) The presentation of Nepal Photo Project on the website of Photo Kathmandu festival, where it was exhibited in 2015, gives a detailed insight of the circumstances of its creation: http://www.photoktm.com/exhibition/nepal-photo-project/ Moreover, NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati and Tara Bedi were frequently interviewed in the following weeks, among others by French online magazine Our Age is 13, available online at:http://www.oai13.com/focus/photojournalisme/seisme-nepal-photo-project/, or Vantage online magazine, part of theMedium platform, available online at:https://medium.com/vantage/insta-of-the-week-38b98040c49d#.nvtl6gi22.
(3) James Nachtwey, “James Nachtwey’s Dispatches From Nepal”, time.com, 8 May 2015.
Available online at:http://time.com/3844923/james-nachtweys-dispatches-from-nepal/.
(4) Victor Segalen, Essay on Exoticism,Duke University Press, p. 21. Original text: “une incompréhensibilité éternelle”, Victor Segalen,Essai sur l’exotisme, Le Livre de Poche, coll. Biblio essais, p. 44.
(5) James Nachtwey, op.cit.
(6) Jérôme Marin, « Instagram croît à l’ombre de Facebook », Le Monde, 10 April 2015.
Available online at:http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2015/04/10/instagram-croit-a-l-ombre-de-facebook_4613587_3234.html.
(7) Even if photography is about addressing a problem, the risk of exoticism exist! (Author’s note at the time of translation).
Photograph: Harisiddhi, Lalitpur district, Nepal, 28 April, 2015, Nepal earthquake series.