It was a search for the elusive Maoist guerrillas that first brought me to Nepal in 2001.

Weeks after landing in Kathmandu, I received a phone call asking me to be at my hotel in half an hour.

Upon returning to Durbar Square, I found a small boy waiting, all of 12 years perhaps. He spoke no English but bade me go with him. We bought bus tickets and alighted 27 hours later in Surkhet, where, after showing me a hotel, he simply walked off.

The following morning, a cadre arrived. With my gear slung, we walked down the main street under inquisitive eyes until buildings gave way to sloping contours and hills swallowed us.

We continued our walk after a night in a hill station, turning a bend after some hours to be greeted by a dozen Maoist guerrillas with garlands and tika, rifles held high to create a tunnel through which we walked.

From the roof of a dilapidated building I addressed the assembled group as requested before marching together for Dailekh.

A week or so later, my first morning back in Kathmandu, chaotic scenes woke me. Outside my window unruly crowds mobbed newspaper vendors. I rushed down and, after a brief and futile attempt to queue as my English upbringing demanded, I fought hand and fist for a paper.

“What does it say?” I asked my hotel manager.

“It appears the Royal Family has been massacred.”

The mediaeval scenes I was privileged to have witnessed in the days that followed imbued me with a deep-rooted sense of responsibility to the Nepali people. I was determined that I would return whenever I could to document their unfolding struggle.

Here, exhibited for the first time in Nepal, are my photographs.

A work dedicated to a brave, generous and tenacious people.

II

Blenkinsop’s perspective is that of extreme proximity: it insists upon a vital occupation of the moment, of the moods of the subjects and the society in which these images have been created. This series proves his capacity for being persistent in locating the explosive centre of the moment—and his extraordinary good fortune in finding the currents of local history.

A guerrilla amidst jungle foliage may be a pun, but a trio of erstwhile rebels being festooned and fed by many hands is a grave reminder of how much the corkscrew of Nepali history has turned. Change is perceptible in the patterns on the uniforms of the riot police, or in the ageing of the now-familiar faces of politicians. But, there is also stasis—the confrontation between the state and its dissenters continues through the years; there are the same flags, the same burning rage, a cycle of violence repeated. It is the same ovine march of the many and the same wile of the few. And on the margins is the incidental: a serene pair of sheep, for instance, or the gleam of a distant river, or the gaze of a butchered goat.

Curiosity and tenacity characterize Blenkinsop’s work. More than anything else there is the courage to lean closer in order to expose the ordinary in the improbable. To minutely study his photographs of Nepal is to be caught in a fractal, eddying view of the immediate past of the country: celebration, dissent, grit and grief are entwined here. A stupa swarmed with violators and victims, for instance, or the timidity on the face of an armed rebel. In Blenkinsop’s work, each detail appears at once accidental and mediated, perhaps an echo of the reality we inhabit, wrought and wrecked, tender and terrible.

Text by Prawin Adhikari