tony makepeace

The photographs in this portfolio are portraits of villagers from the village of Namsaling, a small agricultural community in the far east of Nepal, near the border of Darjeeling and Sikkim. The people of Namsaling descend from Hindu ancestors from India in the south, and from Buddhist ancestors from the north in Tibet and Mongolia. A selection of these images is also posted on Pedro Meyer's Zone Zero photography web site.

I visit this village on a regular basis as part of my work with the Nepal Community Development Foundation, (NCDF).

I have been working on this project for a number of years. I'm currently working on an edit for a book of this series. Exhibition details will be posted here.

I am moved by huge spaces that induce calm, invoke a feeling of solitude, and provide a quiet space to think. In these places there exists a range of colors, sensations, and moods that refer to the vastness of the planet, the endless palette of the sky, and the mysteries of our existence. These scenes remind me that there's a dimension to life that's much larger than the human dimension.

The size and weight of the camera obliges a stationary and meditative perspective. One of the most satisfying aspects of working with the view camera is that the resolution of the large film accommodates many levels of viewing without enforcing one in particular. This helps convey the wholeness of the experience, a feeling of unity with the larger scene as well as the smaller, human details that reside within it.

The work displayed here was photographed with an 8x10 Deardorff view camera, a 4x5 Wisner view camera and a Rolleiflex 120 camera throughout Canada and the United States between 1993 and 2004.

The portraits featured here are of residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in Whiteriver, Arizona. In February of 1999 I began a portraiture project in this community, which is located about 2 hours north east of Pheonix. This is a work in progress.