Portrait 1st place winner

This series of portraits was taken in Kathmandu, Nepal where I spent 3 weeks interviewing and photographing domestic workers in and around the Kathmandu Valley. As the middle and upper classes grow in Nepal, so does the population of domestic worker, who account for some 200,000 workers, in Nepal and make up one of the largest undocumented workforces in the country. The workforce is predominately female and often are internal migrants that have shifted from rural villages to urban centers. The people behind closed doors that are cleaning up after children, washing dishes, doing laundry, and sweeping the floors are tenacious and powerful. Yet domestic workers are deprived of basic rights such as government-regulated working hours and minimum wages. As a result they are vulnerable to manipulation, exploitation and, in extreme cases, modern slavery. By using analog film to photograph the domestic workers I am able to combine fine art with research and photojournalism; by merging elements of both of these aspects of photography, I am able to bring the beauty and the slow speed of fine art to the fast-paced, sometimes invasive photo-journalistic field. All images in this series are shot on film. All are silver gelatin prints.