A Public View of Themselves
Three days after the Trade Center Towers
were leveled to the ground, I opened a photography exhibition in northern Pakistan
for the community about whom it was constructed. The community of less than a
dozen villages is situated in the high mountain valley of Hunza on the internationally
famed Karakoram Highway (KKH) that connects the capital cities of Pakistan and
China.
Before the KKH opened and especially before Partition (Creation of Pakistan and
India, 1947), Hunza was remote and pretty much inaccessible to all but unofficial
personnel. The photography exhibit, Hunza in Treble Vision: 1930s and the 1990s,
was an attempt to document changes associated with the difference in time. That
is, one set of photographs (Single Vision) made in the 1930s was juxtaposed to
two other complementary sets (Double and Treble Visions) made in the 1990s to
document some remarkable transitions.
Using photographs from the exhibition
I will provide background to a geographical area of current interest and, further,
describe a methodology of photography that can be used anywhere and repeated again
and again over time in the same place.