Spiti: some notes on the practice of documentary photography
Spiti: some notes on the practice of documentary photography
Patrick Sutherland has been taking photographs in the Spiti desert mountain valley, located high in the Himalayas, for nearly 25 years. What was initially envisioned as a one-off photographic field trip has developed into an obsessive, long-term, documentary project that is continually shaped by the challenging and complex relationships he has developed with the local communities who live there. As Sutherland notes “The practice of documentary photography is rarely straightforward. It is seldom about mechanically recording the world” but is a process in which images emerge from uncontrolled, unpredictable and random encounters, and necessitates a collusion with the contingencies—as well as structures—of social life, social relations and the surrounding environment. Embracing photo elicitation and collaborative formal portraiture, Sutherland observes that each time he returns to the Spiti Valley his understanding of the landscape and the people who live there shifts slightly, as does the meaning and narrative structure of the archive.
Keywords: Spiti Valley, Obsession, Documentary Photography, Contingency, Image and Text
Manchester Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
