Kevin Bubriski was born in 1954 in North Adams, Massachusetts. He attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. After graduating in 1975, he joined the Peace Corps in Nepal for four years as a water engineer. Smitten by Nepal’s cultural landscape and beauty, he began documenting places and communities in his spare time. With support from Robert Gardner and the Film Study Center of Harvard University, Bubriski returned to Nepal in 1984 to explore the people of Nuwakot, Rasuwa, Gorkha and Manang. In 1985 he returned to Mugu, Humla, Jumla, Siraha and Janakpur, in 1986 to Kanchanpur and in 1987 to Patan, Bhaktapur and Svayambhu. Bubriski’s portraits were taken with a large-format camera, thus engendering an unhurried photographic process and yielding direct, formal portraits.

“My photographs of Nepal are an inside observer’s way of entering into and coming to understand a foreign land that was my home for nine years.” 

“Portraits of Nepal” were exhibited for the first time at The Interchurch Center in New York in 1982, later at the American Cultural Center in Kathmandu in May 1987 and in Brescia, Italy, in 2008. A collection of 89 pictures covering 1984-87 was published in 1993 by Chronicle Books, San Francisco: Portraits of Nepal. The book won the Golden Light Documentary Award in 1993. A second book containing one hundred color photographs was entitled “Power Places of Kathmandu” with a foreword by Keith Dowman.

In 2015, Kevin arrived in Kathmandu in early June when the initial phase of rescue and relief efforts was over. After documenting Kathmandu Valley, he planned to tag along with relief operations to hilly areas but somehow traveled to Sindhupalchowk on his own to photograph the aftermath. After seven years of photographic documentation, his book “Nepal Earthquake” was published in 2022.

Bubriski’s photographs can be found in the permanent collections of museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the International Center of Photography, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He was supported by a number of fellowships, in 2010-11, by the Gardner Visiting Artist Fellowship at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.

“I believe in the power of documentary photography to create understanding between people and places.”

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