They say that to truly know a mountain, you must watch it move. Over a lapse lasted fifteen years, spent six months at a time in the high-altitude silence of Mustang, I have watched the slow, tectonic pulse of a land that is as much a part of my own biology as it is of the earth.

I first came here not just as a visitor, but as an art conservator — someone tasked with the physical preservation of history. But as the years dissolved into decades, the roles reversed. I was not just conserving the murals and the sacred spaces; the land was conserving me. This project is my love letter to that transformation. It is the record of a fifteen-year conversation between a landscape that never speaks and a witness who finally learned how to listen.

I chose to capture this journey mostly through the lens of digital infrared. In the thin, piercing air of the Himalayas, the visible spectrum often feels insufficient to describe the spiritual gravity of the place. Infrared allows me to peel back the veil. It strips away the distractions of color, revealing the bone-structure of the canyons and the radiant, ghostly energy of the high-desert flora. In these images, the sky turns to a deep, obsidian velvet, and the peaks glow with an inner, calcified light. It is Mustang as it feels in the mind's eye: a realm of stark geometry and ancient grace.

There are no people in these frames, yet they are not empty. By focusing on the architecture of the earth and the hand-built sanctuaries that cling to it, I wanted to capture the "presence of the absent." You will see the wind-sculpted ridges, the silvered shadows of the Kali Gandaki, and the stoic endurance of ancient buildings that have weathered centuries. These are the places that raised me.

Fifteen years of returning. Fifteen years of the same dust, the same horizon, and the same wind. This is not a collection of travel photography; it is a map of a long-term devotion. It is a portrait of a home that exists at the edge of the world, rendered in the light that the human eye cannot see, but the heart cannot help but recognize.