All images © 2019-2023 Marc Delforge

I went to Nepal four times, between 1981 and 1986. The first two times alone, the last two with Dorys.
As I said elsewhere, it was in 1981 that I understood what it was to photograph. I had just sold my camera in Calcutta to Arjun Goshal, a famous photographer and a good friend of mine, and suddenly found myself deprived when I arrived in Kathmandu. One day, I rented a Nikon with a wide angle lens, smoked some joints and set off into the streets, streets that I saw for the first time, it seemed to me, even though I had been walking these vibrant streets of the world since 1975…

4 years later:

About the photographic negatives concerning the 1986 stay in Nepal, they are somewhere in my house, but where? I am desperately looking for them. This kind of inconvenience sometimes happens when we are too slow to look back on our past to prove to ourselves that we have really lived our adventurous lives (us then and us today, what is left, that is the question). However, my diaries and my old passport assure me that I was in Nepal from April 10th to May 8th 1985. 

My memories of this period are moreover rather vague, I don’t remember cycling through the streets of Patan or Bhaktapur (which my diary reminds me of), I just remember that Chernobyl fell on us while I was drawing a bleeding world in our room at the Potala Guest House (one of those coincidences my life is full of),

that Dorys bought the most beautiful dress in the world (a short blue silk one for our future wedding) and that in Pashupatinath (a miniature Varanasi) on the bridge over the Bagmati, a sacred cow (why this pleonastic precision, are not all living beings sacred? ) before disappearing as suddenly as it had come, lifted my elbow and whispered that “ULTIMATE REALITY IS ALWAYS THERE.”

Something that I have never forgotten and that my photos show, at least I hope so…