The Hotel by Tenzing Dakpa, Steidl, 2020
Each book comes with a special edition postcard by Tenzing Dakpa
£26 + p&p, Free shipping within UK, 96 pages, 45 images
Otabind softcover with dust jacket
19 x 30.5 cm
English
ISBN 978-3-95829-742-5
1. Edition 03/2020
The Hotel encapsulates and conveys the unique space of Dakpa’s home– his cat’s meanderings, the building’s interiors, his family’s daily labour, and their relationships with each other. Overall, these images capture a site where various social experiences manifest. The hotel’s built-structure is imagined as a container of experiences, where there is an interplay between its perception as a transient space for guests, and actual memories of the family’s migration, identity and hopes.
While a hotel, by itself, may be associated with a sense of anonymity and temporariness, in this case it is also a home. Dakpa connects these ostensibly contrasting ideas at play in his family’s hotel to describe his own migration away from home. As the only family member not involved in running the hotel, he negotiates feelings of detachment when he visits– it is at once a home as well as a place of impermanence.
Complicating this, is also the desire to know his family, which is a primary instigator for this exploration of home. At a certain level, photography’s development continues to be propelled by a desire to confer immortality by reproducing the subject, and yet it paradoxically ends up capturing unfulfilled desires– to fully know the subject and ourselves. This tension is palpable in the series as it captures and reconstructs home.