Nepal Photographs

There is the story of the black magician and how he taught me to believe in magic. It is a story that made no sense for many years and I would not tell, I feared believing in it. There is the story of the Shaman's oracIe and the depth of mystery that experience taught me. To this day I stilI have no way to understand what happened, what I saw, without the Bonpo gods. With such an ancient experience, I could find no modern parallels. And then there is the story that I came to understand only much later of my Tibetan 'Grandfather' teaching me mantras. How he came to my room at night and would repeat to me simple phrases over and over again until I repeated them back. This experience has come to make sense to me only after I have struggled to overcome the absence of my own father in my life.

Anyway, that is what these photographs are really about. They are about my return to Nepal and the emotions that it stirred up. They are about the understanding of Nepal's affect on me and my desire to catch that on fllm. They are about a naive photographer's attempt to photograph magic and mystery. For me that is what Nepal is about. To understand that, I have had to learn to imagine. When I first went to Nepal almost fourteen years ago, my mind could not accommodate this. The idea that there were these different 'realities' didn't even make sense. I had been taught science. Now when I go back it is a relief. I feel is as if I have been let out of a cage. To be in a world where there is magic and mystery as a part of everyday life now seems a wonderful thing.

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