The Public Life of Women. A Feminist Memory Project. Diwas Raja Kc and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati. 558 pages. 591 photos. photo.circle, Nepal Picture Library

The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project won the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards Catalog of the Year. Paris Photo and Aperture announced on November 9, 2023, the selected, by jury, year’s winners of the 2023 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards—the eleventh annual celebration of the photobook’s contributions to the evolving narrative of photography.

The Public Life of Women is an inspirational collection of images, documents, and the profiles of key contributors to feminism and champions of women’s rights in Nepal. Organized by photo.circle, a platform for photography and the force behind Photo Kathmandu, the more than five hundred images included in this volume were drawn from the Nepal Picture Library, a visual archive created with the goal of preserving and exploring the country’s social, cultural, and photographic history.

Diwas Raja Kc is a researcher, writer, and curator based in Kathmandu. He pursued graduate studies in visual culture and history in Sarah Lawrence College, New York, and University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. At Nepal Picture Library, he works on building visual archives and presenting documentary images of historically obscured subjects. His curatorial show Dalit: A Quest for Dignity (2016) explored ways of witnessing assertions and obfuscations about Dalit past in Nepal. He also works as a documentary film editor and has worked with several renowned artists and visual anthropologists. Kc gives workshops on visual storytelling and has taught courses on social history and historiographical methods.

NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati enjoys working across platforms to weave together visual narratives with research, pedagogy, and collective action to create public discourse around themes such as patriarchy, power and justice. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle; a photography platform that has facilitated learning, exhibition making, and publishing opportunities for Nepali photographers. In 2010, she co-founded the Nepal Picture Library; a digital photo archive that documents and creates engagement with a public history of the Nepali people. NayanTara is also the co-founder and Festival Director of Photo Kathmandu, an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years.