2006 Portfolio Prize Runner Up: Tomas van Houtry
An armed Maoist rebel soldier in the People’s Liberation Army waits for other rebels to arrive in the village of Mahat, Nepal, February 22, 2005.
For ten years, Maoist rebels have been struggling to topple the monarchy in Nepal; violence on both sides has led to kingdom-wide destruction and a death toll of more than thirteen thousand. In April 2006, the Maoists shifted tactics and coordinated widespread public protests: masses of people from diverse political parties poured into the streets, defying curfew, burning the monarchs in effigy, and ultimately forcing the king to reduce his grip on power and reinstate parliament.
Tomas van Houtryve first visited Nepal in 1997 as a young philosophy student. As he says, he was “like everyone else, seeking spiritual simplicity and high-altitude adventure. What I found was not a mountain nirvana, but an enigmatic kingdom of curses and contradictions. I was immersed in a society tangled in webs of lies, blood, poverty, and injustice.” In 2004, after the rebels had gained enough strength to destabilize the political and social order, he returned, documenting the revolution from the guerrillas’ rural training camps to protest marches through the streets of Katmandu. Many of his photographs of these intense political actions are, paradoxically, distinguished by their intimacy. Singling out the effect of these events on individuals, he captures the texture of lives upended by revolution
All photographs from the series Kingdom Lost. Courtesy the artist.
Based in Paris, Tomas van Houtryve worked for AP from 1999 until going out on his own in 2003. His reportage from throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas has won numerous awards, including the Young Reporter Award at Perpignan, in 2006, and has appeared in Time, New York Times Magazine, Le Monde, and many other publications.
