Zubeni Lotha conducting the workshop on photography. (Morung Photo by Soreishim Mahong)
Photographer Zubeni Lotha speaks about her photo exhibition on Dimapur town and Hornbill running simultaneously at the venue where the other sessions unfold. Zubeni Lotha is a photographer from Nagaland. Her main focus of work is in Nagaland where she is looking to photograph an indigenous culture and society that is fast losing its way of life as rapid socio-economic changes take over. In her own words: “These portraits of Dimapur town and Hornbill are put together as one but are actually two different works which converged somewhere, somehow. I first started photographing Dimapur as part of my personal project on memories of the place; my hometown. My romantic memory of this place was challenged when I started to photograph it because Dimapur, a small city in Nagaland state, has one of the longest histories of conflict with the Indian State. It is also a land where "exotic head-hunting" indigenous people have long attracted anthropologists who study the Nagas, and are amongst the most researched group of people in India. The hornbill is not just a bird in these photographs. To me, the hornbill symbolises something more than what it appears to be because it is physically absent from the landscape but has a strong cultural presence in the work of local artists and artisans, in cultural dances, in folk-stories and most of all during the annual cultural Hornbill Festival of the state. My idea was to construct the head of the bird and photograph it as portraits in and around Dimapur, to explore its prominence and the love and attachment people bear towards it. But the more I tried to explore this in the process of photographing it, the more interesting questions arose. Questions about the authenticity of my memories, about culture, about identity and stereotypes, about representations, self-representations, violence and conflict. And while I was grappling with these thoughts, the portraits started to take a different shape. These portraits do not define a place or a people in a given time; they challenge the definitions amidst changes taking place.”Zubeni Lotha
