Kevin Bubriski first began photographing Nepal in 1975, when he was stationed there as a Peace Corps water engineer. In the decades that followed he continued to shoot in Nepal, creating a large documentary record of the country. His images are now on view the Center for Government and International Studies, at Harvard University, in an exhibition titled, Shadows of Shangri-La: Nepal in Photographs.

On being awarded the Robert Gardner Fellowship to continue work on this series, he said, “My photographs of Nepal are an inside observer’s way of entering into and coming to understand a foreign land that was my home for nine years,” says Bubriski. “The Fellowship will allow me to explore and share the visual anthropology and recent cultural history of Nepal.”

The exhibition and the accompanying volume Nepal, 1975–2011 (Peabody Museum Press & Radius Books, 2014) explores the visual anthropology and recent cultural history of Nepal, which he describes as an “evolution from an exotic destination for overland European travelers in the 1970s, political turmoil and strict monarchic rule in the 1970s and 1980s, democracy movement of 1990, the ten-year civil war from 1996 to 2006, to the current precarious peace.”

Left: A Tamang Buddhist shaman in trance at the sacred Gosaikunda Lake, 1978. Right: An elderly Tibetan women with prayer wheel and rosary holds her hands in prayer as she enters the Boudhanath Stupa area on the Tibetan New Year, while Nepali police await a call to action. Kathmandu, 2011. Photographs © Kevin Bubriski.

“Kevin Bubriski’s own work is distinguished,” said William L. Fash, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum. “Nepal is both a remote and salient part of the world, one that the Peabody would be well served to represent in its photography collections and publications, particularly given the very large and significant collections we have from neighboring Tibet. The kinds of documentation that Kevin has engaged in for three decades now are very much in an anthropological (‘human condition’ and politics) vein that is of universal interest.”

Shadows of Shangri-La: Nepal in Photographs continues at the Center for Government and International Studies through September 30^th. South Building, Concourse Level, Harvard University, 1730 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA. Information.

Kevin Bubriski | Nepal 1975-2011 opens Friday, June 6 at Gallery Kayafas, with a reception from 5:30-8 pm. 450 Harrison Avenue, Boston, MA. Information.