Sweet Land of Liberty

Sweet Land of Liberty is a collaborative visual conversation with young, working-class Nepali men, exploring masculinity, migration, and inherited identities through portraiture, play, and imagined forms of self-representation.

Sweet Land of Liberty explores young, working-class Nepali men and the ways masculinity is shaped by social expectations, social and class inheritance, and migration. Many of the men I worked with came from rural areas and marginalized communities in Nepal and have inherited the role and identity of “labourer” from generations of men before them. In Kathmandu and other economic centres in the region, they are often found working on construction sites, helping to build the rapidly changing city while navigating expectations of what it means to be a man, a worker, a son, and a provider.

This project grew out of my previous long-term documentary work with similar groups of young transnational migrant workers. Over time, I became interested not only in observing their everyday lives, but also in how they might represent themselves beyond the roles and identities passed down to them. Sweet Land of Liberty is a collaborative visual conversation in which the young men and I make portraits together through conversation, improvisation, trial and error, and play.

We use whatever is around us: found materials, clothing, props, gestures, fragments of popular culture, family photographs, and images from social media. Some ideas come from me, while others come from the men themselves. Together, we create images that move between the everyday and the imagined, between who they are and how they might want to be seen. In this process, the photograph becomes less a record of reality and more a space for fantasy, self-representation, and possibility.

What happens when a working body is given space to imagine itself differently? What do these images reveal about the ways we perform, negotiate, and resist the expectations placed upon us? And what might become possible when an image becomes a small rehearsal for another kind of freedom?