"The 179 photographs by 80 photographers in A People War represented the impact of violence on individuals. We often talk of 'the people' in the abstract, and it has become almost meaningless. By distilling "the people" down to individuals and their families, recording their personal loss, and storing the images of the aftermath of tragedy we take photography to the lowest common denominator of private grief. This is why the pictures are so powerful: because we relate to the images at a people-to-people level, as one person to another, as one Nepali to another. But it is when we view the pictures together in an exhibition, with hundreds of our fellow-citizens, that it turns into a collective catharsis. The individual photos of grieving relatives, weeping widows, orphans too traumatised to cry, then become 'us'.

When A People War was published in December 2006 many thought it was a powerful pictorial chronicle of the conflict. However, because of the cost of producing a high quality book, its readership was limited. Which is why nepa-laya decided to take the pictures on a traveling exhibition across Nepal.

The photo exhibition tour toured the country over three months in 2007, visiting 31 districts where 350,000 people came to see it. People - students, teachers, traders, farmers, political leaders and ex-combatants - queued for hours, and once inside, they lingered over pictures, looking and re-reading captions. Then they wrote their feelings in guest books, jotting down poems, their individual experiences of the war, unburdening emotions they had kept bottled up for so long.

In Chautara the pictures were displayed amidst the ruins of the district hospital, which had been destroyed in a battle in April 2006. In Ilam the exhibition was held inside the auditorium of an orphanage in which ten blind students had cowered while a night-long battled raged around them. In Tansen the exhibition itself resembled installation art, as the pictures were arranged around the ruins of a Tansen Durbar that used to serve as the district administration office and had been completely destroyed.

The victims and participants of the conflict came to look at the pictures together, and led us to rethink victimhood altogether. We often regard victimhood as being the prerogative of non-combatants, but warriors are also victims. As they looked at the photographs, policemen and ex-guerrillas were often overcome with guilt and memories of the violence they witnessed or perpetrated. There were families of the disappeared who came to see if they could find their missing relatives among the photographs, children who had witnessed the war themselves or lived through nights of battle came to see how the war affected everyone, not just their family or their village. It wasn't the way we planned it, but what started out as a pictorial archive of the war had grown into a peace movement. And that proved the tremendous desire on the part of the Nepali people for peace and justice."

-- Kunda Dixit, from Never Again