Nepal, Oct. 19 -- Oral history, art, stone inscriptions and the written word have helped us understand the Nepali world and its history. But it was the advent of photography that dramatically changed the way we can visualise memory.

Soon after the invention of daguerrotype and photography, cameras arrived in Nepal via British India. Photographs taken by Clarence Comyn Taylor in 1863 were discovered by J P Losty in 1992, and were possibly the earliest pictures ever taken of Nepalis.

Soon, there were scholars and photographers like Samuel Bourne, George Ramsay, Henry Ballantine, Theodore Julius Hoffmann, Cecil Bendall, John Claude White and others who took portraits and pictorialised Nepal's landscape.

Nepali photographers like Dirghama...