Songs from Hill and Land

Songs from Hill and Land explores young working-class Nepali men’s masculinity, blending reportage and visual collaboration. It reveals rural men’s struggles for dignity within a rigid social order, navigating economic hardships and migration dreams.

Songs from Hill and Land began as an inquiry into how young working-class men in Nepal perform masculinity and navigate gender roles within a complex, multilateral patriarchal structure that intersects between religions, caste, ethnicities and economic class. Initially conceived in 2015 as a reportage-style project, it gradually evolved into a visual dialogue between the photographer and the participants. Acknowledging the limitations of being a casual observer, the photographer invited the young men to collaborate—encouraging them to imagine and perform versions of their desired self-presentation.

Masculine ideals in Nepal differ from those in the West. Gestures like hand-holding as a sign of solidarity or tucking a flower behind the ear do not necessarily signify femininity. While the project does not explicitly chart Nepal’s intricate male hierarchies, it offers glimpses into an unspoken social order where rural men remain outsiders in the eyes of urban society. For those born to the fields and hills, masculinity is an act of navigation—a continuous negotiation with economic constraints in pursuit of dignity and recognition. Kathmandu, the nation’s bustling gateway, becomes a testing ground where they must prove themselves as breadwinners before the lure of distant shores calls them onward.