Picturing Ladakhi Nomads over the Span of a Generation

Sharing photographs and stories with a pastoral group in Jammu and Kashmir State, India, we consider questions about repatriation. Images from the early 1980s were shared from 2009 to 2010,, by which point many of the pastoralists had moved to the main town, Leh, in the province of Ladakh where they work primarily as laborers. The literature on repatriation of images and objects focuses largely on historical collections and their political implications, but this article explores the process of working within living memory. We suggest that visual and textual narratives are so closely interwoven that they should be given equal weight and approached as a single entity.