“Walking Light in Bhaktapur”

This series was photographed in July 2025 at Bhaktapur Durbar Square in Kathmandu, Nepal.
On a morning when the clouds had not yet lifted, a line of young monks in orange robes slowly left their monastery. Barefoot, they walked through the streets, receiving offerings from local residents and following the stone-paved route through courtyards, alleys and the square. A city not yet fully awake was gradually lit by their procession. I walked with them, sometimes inside the line, sometimes stepping back to a street corner, observing from different angles and distances how this “orange line” was repeatedly cut, stretched and then joined again by the city. On one side of the frame are the young monks, focused on their alms bowls; on the other, men drinking tea and talking, women arranging their vegetable stalls, motorbikes parked by the curb and stray dogs resting nearby. Here, the ritual does not float above everyday life – it shares the same streets with all the ordinary noise of the world. Their world may be divided into very simple fragments: a dog that always sleeps on the same step, the metal bowl resting in their hands, the stairs and corners they have to walk every day, a small patch of sky that flickers above them when they look up. For them, the city may not yet be a complete map, but a route to be memorised and a series of faces that return each morning without a name. They still carry the innocence of childhood, yet they are already learning how to move through the city, how to keep a slow and steady rhythm inside its noise. Through these ten photographs, I hope viewers will see not only an alms procession, but also the breath of an old city at dawn – that small strand of moving light passing between brick walls, stone steps and human figures.