Earlier this month, documentary photographer and multimedia journalist from India, Avidha Raha, exhibited her 30-photo series ‘Rising Above the Melt’ at the USC Fisher Museum of Art. She is an Arts and Climate Grant Awardee, along with being a graduate student at USC pursuing MA Specialized Journalism. She is also a Research Assistant with the USC Center for Climate Journalism and Communication.
Before moving to the US, Raha was covering stories from Ladakh, a small but heavily militarized Indian territory in the upper Himalayas, engulfed in between China and Pakistan.
The region has a significant Buddhist population.
Rising Above the Melt is a long-term documentary photo project based in the Himalayan mountains of Zanskar Valley, Ladakh, India.
Young girls from nearby villages are enrolling as nuns at a remote Buddhist nunnery at 4400m high altitude, to access better education. The nunnery teaches Buddhist texts as well as formal courses approved by the Indian government.
As climate change disrupts glacial cycles and weather patterns, the nuns, including little girls as well as adult women, bear its impacts firsthand. It has been impacting labor, food storage and survival practices in an increasingly unstable environment.
They have to engage with untimely agricultural labor, collect grass earlier for cattle to sustain during winters, store food at irregular intervals, wash clothes and store water during school hours, as that is the only time water is accessible through a narrow pipeline. This unpredictability around water has resulted in more time consumed for daily chores, directly affecting the education of the little nuns, and schedule of the adult nuns.
Respecting their boundaries and request for privacy during sensitive events like prayers and chanting, this project aims to document the daily lives of all the nuns: the fun and frolic, school hours, playtime, cooking, sense of community and the shared spirit to learn, despite all the challenges.
This blog post spotlights Avidha Raha, a Graduate Research Assistant at USC Annenberg and Master’s Student in Specialized Journalism.
