This account was written in July 2025, as the author looked through the contact sheets of newly developed film rolls for her ongoing photo-series (2019–present) documenting the trans-Himalayas. This essay unfolds the journey of imagining, seeing, and photographing mountains, along with the revelations that continue to shape the author’s understanding of an intrinsically interconnected, evolving world.
4 pm, after school.
I sat with my drawing book open in front of me. Pointed, triangular mountains across the spread, a partial sun sandwiched between two triangles, three birds flying across the sky, a river winding down to the bottom of the page. It was the simplest landscape to draw where almost everything moved: the sun with its alternating long and short rays, the birds arcing in line, the river snaking down. But the mountains remained solid and firm, standing utterly still. No matter what colours filled the other drawing books, the mountains remained an unshakeable brown-green with unyielding sides.
I took this lesson of immutable mountains up to my early teens, journeying across the Lower and Eastern Himalayas blanketed in all shades of green. A striking image of the permanence of the mountains overwhelmed me every single time.
In April 2011, l flew over subtle undulations of the Lower Himalayas stretching into the Greater Himalayas with countless ribbon-like glistening glaciers. There was a seamless shift into the Trans-Himalayas with rugged, craggy contours topped with snow. A breathtaking expanse of barren elevations glided past the window. We had landed in Leh, at some 3200m above sea level.
When surrounded by the magnificence of towering mountains, one tends to feel small—insignificant, even. But this time, I struck a chord with them. I felt a movement in their bare brown veins, as though they were in the making. The sharp triangles in my drawing book had dissolved into a medley of fractures and faults. The verdant valleys of Nepal and North East India had masked these excellently. Now, the raw rocks laid exposed before me. I couldn’t help but feel an undeniable sense of geological flow. The stillness of the mountains against which I measured all kinds of motion until now had a continual, unhurried manoeuvre of their own.
Over the years, I regularly traveled across the foothills of the Himalayas while studying in New Delhi, where time raced against itself. In the back of my mind stayed the quiet hum of a glacial, continual transformation that I felt underneath my feet in 2011. 7 years later, I found myself standing on those pulsating rocks again.
In April 2018, I woke up to the extremely familiar tune of a mantra I grew up listening to. It was playing from the Shanti Stupa. I walked up the hill along the company of the cyclical cadence of the mantra. The spectacular panorama of the Leh valley unfolded. On my skora / སྐོར་ར / परिक्रमा (circumambulation) of the stupa, the barren mountains looked straight into my eyes; the ones donned in snow were distant observers. Even in apparent statis, all of them moved.
I picked up my father’s Agfa and drove. It was a phenomenal cinematic sweep—a geological theatre panning across millennia. About 50 million years ago, continental collisions had caused celestial uplifts from the Earth’s surface, giving birth to the abodes of snow: the Himalaya. The unadorned skin of the Ladakh Range paved the way for my photographic enquiry into the breath of these mountains.
Stratified layers, sweeping folds, and almost surgical-looking incisions are some of the many compositions I was initially drawn to in the colossal mountains of Ladakh. And these become far more perceptible and exciting in winter. The raw geomorphology presents itself with uncompromising clarity—highlighting fractures, fissures and outcrops. Then come the frozen waters, as if arrested in motion. When I first walked on the frozen Zanskar River, I knew I had my first photograph of what would become a long-term photo-series.
In the warmer months, the glacial melt gradually reshapes the landscape. One can tell a lot about the past, present and future from glacial troughs, alluvial fans and hummocky terrains. While these do feed my photographic journey, what nourishes it further is the wealth of stories living in these mountains. Accounts passed down through generations define the way of living in this land. We are taught that the Himalayas formed over millions of years, when the sediments of the Tethys Sea were compressed, lifted and folded upon the tectonic collision of the Indian and Eurasian plates. In the valleys here, I learned of a spiritual geography.
I try to position my photographs between the scientific and the spiritual. An ancient flood is also a curse. A dried paleolake is also a lake drained by a scholar to build a monastery in what is now a moonland. A striking site of wind erosion is also one of epic clashes between rulers. Two sides of the same coin, bridged by my camera.
I continue to wrap my mind around impermanence. Sometimes, it feels like it is the only plausible understanding of our existence—of course everything is in a constant state of flux and nothing has a fixed essence of its own; every phenomenon arises in dependence of others. But the way we have formatted our lives today pushes us far from this understanding. Individuality, ownership and control is the ultimate pursuit. The relentless emphasis on the self, divorced from others, stitches only a fragmented societal fabric where the fundamental tenet of life, i.e., interdependence, is forgotten. The mountains ease this tension. They teach me that striving for static ideals feeds the illusion of permanence.
The title of my photo-series, “Rangjon” (རང་བྱོན་) hints at a miraculous self-making. Superficially, it may seem to echo the pursuit of isolated creation. But the self-making of the mountains is not a self-contained act; it is an intricate emergence from the interconnected web of the forces of being. The processes of creation and transformation are inherently interdependent, and every self-made part of the mountain reflects the others. Alas, it takes a mountain to move another.
When I look at these photographs, I feel glad that I chose my father’s Agfa. It is not like the digital cameras I used before, with myriad settings and remarkable, almost infinite capabilities.
This small plastic body with fixed focus and a simple rotary shutter is perfect for a beginner in photography. I am a beginner in photographing these mountains. This camera allows me to focus only on the light on the mountains and rely on my intuition. A modern camera would certainly render brilliant images, enhancing exponentially the geomorphological features that I try to capture. But I do not want that—I want my photographs for Rangjon to be as unadorned as the mountains.
I am also a beginner in black and white photography. Color is beautiful, but it is also a lot of visual information. Behind the camera, I try to follow sunlight, the sculptor. As the sun moves across the sky above the mountains, shadows grow and recede, transforming the character of the mountains. This mirrors the geomorphology, as a seemingly static rock is constantly redefined over the day. In black and white, the interplay of light and shadow on the stark textures of the mountains puts an emphasis on their formation. I am told it also lends an inherent timelessness to the images, evoking thorough geological respirations. The self-making of the mountains is that of imperceptible movements and ancient narratives. For me, the blacks and the whites make it visible and palpable. A stone grey intensifies the charcoal grey, deepening the jet black. This seemingly limited visual spectrum then rewinds the spool to the enduring geological events and processes that continue to date.
I am back to the cosmic web of continuous becoming. These mountains exemplify that true “self-making” does not happen in isolation, but in interconnectedness. The enduring presence of mountains is a testament to the profound interdependence of forces which make them, us, and everything in between.
4 am,
The sun hasn’t risen yet. The moon illuminates the river. The mountains are drawing themselves.
