An early morning view of the temples of Bhaktapur Photographs courtesy of Daphne Johnston. Students earned three hours of credit for the three-week trip. Lau and Johnston took the group to some of the country's less-traveled locales to expose them to life in Nepal. Their mission was to take photographs, Lau said, but experiences, not images, were the focus. The following are excerpts from a final project by Katie Mitchell, Spanish and anthropology student from Solon, Iowa.
Consciousness opens to sounds before images early in the morning.
Before eyes opened to the morning-yellow corners of an unfamiliar room there were only the cadences of footsteps and cart wheels on the street below. Water splattered to the pavement. Bells sounded out, piercing the haze of early morning sounds. On the first day I took only one picture. Leaning off the edge of a rooftop, I saw many images, but photographed only a row of flowerpots as they marched geometrically around the side of a cafeteria.