What the flood left behind: My journey as a photographer through Nepal’s ruins

After Nepal’s devastating floods in the last week of August this year, I travelled into the mountains to document what remained. I found homes buried in mud, devastated communities, families searching for their belongings, and ordinary objects that had become the last evidence of lives interrupted.

The first thing I noticed was the mud. It was everywhere. It clung to the walls, filled the rooms, covered the roads, and swallowed the lower floors of buildings that had once stood several storeys high. 

In places, the earth had risen so far that a window was now almost level with the ground. A person could stand outside and look into what had once been someone’s upstairs bedroom.

The water had receded but it left all the trails of unimaginable destruction.

In one building, I saw a man standing amid the wreckage, lifting a large plastic sack from a room half-buried in silt. Outside, another man loaded salvaged belongings onto a small truck. The walls around them were stained brown. Electrical wires hung loose. Beyond the doorway lay a landscape of stones, broken timber, and hardened mud.

I raised my camera.

Being a photojournalist in a disaster zone is a strange feeling. You arrive with equipment designed to preserve a fraction of a second, while the people around you are trying to recover years of their lives. You look for light, angle, composition, and the details that might explain what happened. 

They look for clothing, valuables, cooking utensils, or whatever the water has spared. The distance between those two activities can be uncomfortable.

I have spent much of my professional life photographing disasters in Bangladesh. Cyclones, floods, river erosion, political violence, accidents, and the slow displacement caused by climate change have taken me across the country. 

I have visited coastal villages where saltwater has made farmland unusable, communities where riverbanks have disappeared, and settlements where people have rebuilt their homes several times, knowing they may have to do so again.

Over the years, I have learned that the aftermath of a disaster rarely resembles its television images. The water may have stopped rising and the storm may have passed. But people are still trying to determine where to sleep, what to eat, and whether anything they owned can be recovered.

The real work of survival begins when the cameras start to leave.

In 2023, I travelled to Turkiye after the devastating earthquake. It was among the most difficult assignments of my career, although the trouble began before I reached the disaster zone.

At Istanbul Airport, my colleague Zakir Bhai and I spent nearly ten hours waiting at immigration. We had little food and no clear indication of when we would be allowed through. We sat there, increasingly tired, uncertain whether our assignment would begin at all.

An immigration officer noticed us as he was leaving after his shift. He approached, listened to our situation, and handed us a large piece of bread. He told us not to worry. Perhaps, when his superior arrived, we would be allowed to proceed.

I remember the bread more clearly than the hours of waiting.

Eventually, Anadolu Agency intervened, and we were allowed to leave the airport. We travelled to the earthquake-stricken areas, where entire neighbourhoods had collapsed and families were searching for the missing.

I photographed the wreckage and the grief. When I returned to Bangladesh, I was exhausted. But the physical fatigue was temporary. The images stayed with me.

Three years later, another disaster took me abroad.

Back in Nepal

On August 26, 2026, severe flash floods and landslides struck parts of Nepal, leaving widespread destruction. I travelled from Bangladesh to document the aftermath, particularly in Nuwakot and other affected areas.

I had read reports of destroyed homes, damaged roads, and communities cut off by landslides. None of them prepared me for the scale of what I found.

From above, parts of the landscape looked almost unreal. A broad river wound through a valley covered in grey sediment. Buildings stood in the middle of what appeared to be an enormous, dried riverbed. Some were tilted. Others had been buried so deeply that only their upper floors remained visible. Roads ended abruptly in banks of mud.

There were houses on either side of the river, and houses in the middle of its new course. The distinction between land and water had become uncertain.

In one settlement, a multistorey building stood surrounded by debris, its lower levels submerged beneath silt. Elsewhere, the exposed concrete skeleton of a house revealed rooms that had lost their walls. Clothes still hung from a beam. A man sat inside, surrounded by broken masonry and household belongings.

I photographed him from outside.

It was an ordinary domestic scene made strange by its surroundings. The clothes were still hanging where someone had left them. The man was sitting where the floor remained. The building, however, no longer functioned as a home.

I kept finding these contradictions.

A window remained intact, although the room behind it was filled with mud. A doorway opened onto a pile of stones. A staircase led nowhere. Familiar objects had survived inside structures that had not.

One of the photographs I took showed a collection of women's personal belongings scattered across a rough surface…red glass bangles, a comb, a small mirror in a blue plastic frame, cosmetics, and pieces of red thread.

They were inexpensive things. In an ordinary household, they might have occupied a drawer or a corner of a dressing table. Here they lay exposed among gravel and dust.

I did not know who owned them, whether their owner had survived, or how they had come to rest there. I knew only that someone had once used them.

The mirror was particularly striking. Its surface was still intact. I photographed the objects without moving them.

There is a temptation, when photographing destruction, to search for the largest possible image: a collapsed building, a ruined neighbourhood, a landscape transformed beyond recognition. Such pictures are important. They establish scale.

But sometimes a comb explains more than a collapsed wall.

Proof of life

In another place, a young girl walked along a rocky riverbank carrying a bottle and using a trekking pole to negotiate the uneven ground. She wore a dark outfit and green sandals. Behind her stretched an enormous bed of grey sediment, with houses and green hills in the distance.

She was small against the landscape.

I watched her make her way over the stones. It seemed to say something about what life had become. A journey that might once have been straightforward now required navigating a landscape rearranged by water.

Children were also living in temporary shelters.

At one camp, large blue tents had been erected in rows. Chinese characters were printed on some of the canvas. Outside one tent, three small boys played with pieces of cardboard. One sat inside a makeshift cardboard structure while the others stood nearby.

The adults around them had lost homes. The children were still finding ways to play.

I photographed them in the afternoon light, their small figures framed by the blue canvas. The camp offered temporary protection, but little privacy. Families were living within thin fabric walls, surrounded by the possessions they had managed to save.

A tent can provide shelter. It cannot easily replace the routines of a household, the familiarity of a bedroom, or the quiet certainty of having somewhere permanent to return to.

Elsewhere, I watched people clearing mud from their homes.

At one building, a woman in a patterned red tunic, yellow trousers, and rubber boots worked with a shovel, pushing heavy deposits of silt away from a window. Another person worked from inside the darkened room.

The mud had risen almost to the window frame.

The woman leaned forward, using her body weight to move the material. It looked exhausting. There was no machinery in sight, only people working against an accumulation of earth that seemed almost impossible to remove by hand.

I photographed her as she worked.

I wondered how long it would take to clear even a single room. Then I looked at the rest of the building.

Rebuilding and reconstructing 

In other places, people were carrying sacks of recovered belongings to waiting vehicles. The work was repetitive and slow. Every object had to be dug out, cleaned, carried, and assessed. Some things could be saved. Others had to be abandoned.

A house destroyed by a flood does not disappear all at once. Its contents are recovered piece by piece, if they can be recovered at all. The most difficult photographs, however, involved people who had lost family members.

At one location, a wall was covered with missing-person notices. Faces looked out from dozens of sheets of paper, some printed in colour, others in black and white. Names, telephone numbers, and descriptions had been written beneath the photographs. Several notices overlapped. Some were weathered or partially torn.

A woman carrying a small child stood before the wall. I photographed her from behind.

I could not know which notice, if any, she was looking for. But the scene was difficult to forget. A child rested against her back while, in front of her, the wall held the faces of people whose whereabouts were unknown.

The notices transformed the disaster from a landscape of damaged buildings into a collection of individual absences. Each photograph belonged to someone. Each telephone number represented the possibility of news.

The wall was an improvised archive of uncertainty.

There were also moments of quiet persistence.

I photographed an older man standing beside an open window, looking towards the damaged river valley. Mud marked the windowpanes. The room behind him was dark, while daylight fell across his face and shirt.

He held the window frame with one hand. Beyond him, the riverbed stretched towards the hills.

I could not tell what he was thinking. Perhaps he was assessing the damage. Perhaps he was simply looking outside. The photograph could not answer that question, and I did not want it to pretend otherwise.

The thing that interested me was the contrast between the familiar gesture and the unfamiliar view. A man looking out of his window is among the most ordinary scenes imaginable. Here, the landscape outside had been violently altered.

Even the act of looking out had acquired a different meaning.

Travelling between these places was difficult. Roads had been washed away or blocked by debris. In some areas, vehicles could go no further, and I had to continue on foot, carrying my cameras and equipment along narrow mountain paths.

The hills were green, the air often damp, and the valleys filled with grey deposits left by the floodwaters. The beauty of the landscape made the destruction seem more abrupt.

I walked for hours.

Sometimes the weight of my camera bag became almost unbearable. My legs ached. I was hungry, tired, and increasingly aware of how far I had travelled from the nearest accessible road.

But each new settlement revealed another scene I felt compelled to document. One afternoon, after a particularly long walk, I stopped and sat on a rock.

I had reached the point where even lifting my camera seemed like an effort. I put down my bag and looked around.

Then I noticed another rock nearby. It was large, heavy, and seemed entirely out of place. The floodwaters appeared to have carried it from somewhere farther up the mountain or river channel. I could not know its original location or how far it had travelled, but its presence suggested the enormous force of the current.

I sat looking at it.

Moments of reflections

Throughout the assignment, I had been trying to understand the flood through what it had destroyed: buildings, roads, bridges, and settlements. The rock offered another way of measuring its power.

Water had moved something that appeared immovable. The houses, by comparison, had stood little chance. I picked up my camera again.

In several places, I saw colourful prayer flags strung across the river. Red, green, yellow, and blue fabric moved gently in the wind, with muddy water and damaged buildings beyond them.

I photographed the flags against the river valley.

Their colours stood out in a landscape otherwise dominated by grey and brown. Some carried printed prayers. They were familiar objects in Nepal's mountain communities, but here they appeared against the evidence of a recent catastrophe.

Elsewhere, people worked among piles of logs and debris. In one scene, two adults stood beside a large upright piece of timber, surrounded by stones and broken wood. Beyond them, damaged buildings stood in a broad expanse of silt.

Life was continuing in fragments.

People were clearing rooms, salvaging furniture, arranging temporary shelters, caring for children, and returning to places that no longer resembled their homes. There was no single moment at which recovery began. It was already happening, unevenly, while the destruction was still being documented.

I have often wondered what a photograph can accomplish in such circumstances.

It cannot rebuild a house. It cannot find a missing relative. It cannot restore the years a family spent accumulating the objects now buried beneath mud.

It may attract attention. It may provide evidence. It may preserve a scene that will otherwise disappear as roads are repaired, buildings demolished, and communities begin rebuilding.

But photography also involves choices.

Where should I stand? How close should I move? Is the person in front of me aware that I am photographing them? Does the image reveal something important, or am I merely recording another person's most vulnerable moment?

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Abdul Goni is a senior photographer of Daily Waadaa