A digital archive of photographs documenting the country’s history, focusing on its marginalised and understudied groups, Nepal Picture Library (NPL) was established by the photography platform photo.circle in 2011 in Lalitpur, Nepal. Through exhibitions and photobooks, NPL intends to support public engagement with history, especially in the context of the 2006 People’s Movement that marked the country’s transition from a monarchy to a federal republic, and its aftermath. 

The archive comprises photographs by professionals and amateurs, and is organised by contributor. The images are acquired from family albums, institutional collections, photo studios and other sources, via online announcements and word-of-mouth. Early NPL exhibitions, such as Postcards and Beyond (2012) at Siddhartha Art Gallery, Kathmandu, showed photographs of major contributors including Mukunda Bahadur Shrestha, the first official photographer for the Nepal Tourism Department. Shrestha’s collection — the first that NPL acquired — comprises his own images of rural Nepal, as well as those of other, anonymous photographers. Another major NPL collection comes from the personal archive of Juju Bhai Dhakhwa, whose photographs of residents of Nagbahal in Lalitpur from the 1960s and 1970s have been cited as examples of vernacular photography and its potential to convey emotional depth and subjectivity. Dhakwa’s photographs comprised the exhibition Juju Bhai Dhakhwa: Keeper of Memories, shown at Photo Kathmandu — a photography festival and another photo.circle initiative — and the Jakarta Biennale in 2015; they were published as a photobook the following year. 

As an extension of the 2015 edition of Photo Kathmandu, NPL held two travelling exhibitions — The 90s: A Democratic Awakening, which featured the work of photojournalist Bikas Rauniar, and Facing the Camera: A History of Nepali Studio Photography — at Birgunj, Gorkha and Lalitpur.

Major NPL exhibitions also include Dalit: A Quest for Dignity (2016), and The Public Life of Women (2018) — both first shown at Photo Kathmandu, and later published as photobooks. Dalit: A Quest for Dignity was curated by Diwas Raja KC, drawing from the archives of news agencies and NGOs, and covered over six decades of Nepali Dalit political and cultural history, beginning with the temple-entry movements in the 1950s. It was also shown at Patan Museum in Nepal, and at the 2018 Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim, India. The Public Life of Women, curated by Raja KC and NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati, emerged from NPL’s Feminist Memory Project, which documents women’s lives and feminist movements in modern Nepal with photographs, posters, letters, diaries and various other ephemera acquired from personal and institutional collections. The materials were exhibited on multiple occasions in and outside Nepal: at Photo Kathmandu (2018); Studio Khirki (2018) and India Art Fair (2019) in New Delhi; at the Women in Photography exhibition (2019) at Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film in Singapore, the Istanbul Biennial (2022), and the Kochi Muziris Biennale (2023). The five-part photobook of the exhibition, published in 2023, won the award for Photography Catalog of the Year at the Paris Photo-Aperture PhotoBook Awards.

Other NPL projects have explored local history through interviews and fieldwork in addition to visual material. The Kathmandu Valley Urban History Project, launched in March 2020, focused on urban development in the region and explored community-oriented alternatives to conventional urban planning. In 2022, the project was displayed at the exhibition Quick Time, Old River and a Sky Full of Dreams, held at Patan House in Lalitpur. NPL also investigated the environmental and anthropological impact of Nepal’s twentieth-century development through the project Indigenous Pasts, Sustainable Futures. As part of this, the online exhibition The Skin of Chitwan (2020) explored the relationship between the Chitwan region’s indigenous Tharu community and their natural environment, including problems caused by recent resource extraction. 

NPL’s work is funded partly by the sale of photobooks and partly by various cultural institutions, often on a project-specific basis. In 2023, the Feminist Memory Project received support from the Magnum Foundation Fund.