| Images | About the Photographer (Click on Image to see Album) |
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ABHIJIT NANDI b. 1977, India THE IMAGINARY “I” When I wanted to imprison myself within confines of my room, when a lonely existence became deathlike, it was just then that I felt the urge to at least look at myself. Thus was born the need of a mirror. In my mirror-less room I looked at myself through my camera- and soon the 'eye' became the 'I'. |
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AMIT MADHESHIYA b. 1982, India AT A TENT THEATRE NEAR YOU For about six decades now, traveling tent cinema companies accompany Jatras, annual religious fairs which tour rural Maharashtra, western India, after the crop gathering season ends in October. Traveling with these fairs, not very far from the cinema capital of India, Mumbai, the tent talkies visit remote villages that are far from fixed-site theaters. Films are shown in large tents, using makeshift equipment, with the audience seated on the ground. The traveling cinemas show mixed fare, including regional language films, Bollywood blockbusters and Hollywood movies. But they are facing a fight for survival as DVDs become more easily accessible and cable networks penetrate further into the country. |
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AMIT SHEOKAND b. 1983, India AMYGDALA The amygdala is an almond shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the temporal lobe of the brain involved in the processing of emotions such as fear, anger and pleasure. Amygdala is a body of work in which I create images without a camera by distressing negatives in various ways to attain an abstract image representing various state of mind. However the final interpretation of the image is not strict, being an abstract image, it is up to the viewer to decipher the image. |
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ANA GALAN b. 1969, Spain VIV (R)E LA VIE! Viv(r)e la vie! is a photography series “in process”, consisting of photographs of couples in profile with a landscape of a countryside in the background, snapshots which evoke the Diptych of the Duchess and Duke of Urbino by Piero Della Francesca. |
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BHARAT CHOUDHARY b. 1980, India THE SILENCE OF ‘OTHERS’ The Silence of ‘Others’ documents the emotional struggle of young Muslims in the face of negative perceptions and religious discriminations in the post 9/11 and 7/7 era. I started working in Mid-west America and I am now in United Kingdom. My images intend to reveal what many young Muslims are silently enduring: their frustration, depression and confusion as they continue to live in an Islamophobic society. I am not a Muslim and The Silence Of ‘Others’ is not about taking sides. It is about understanding people, their minds and hearts and believing that we are all the same. |
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BHUMI AHLUWALIA b. 1987, India Shortly after my graduation, I decided to study photography. It was towards this dream that I ended up in a rather remote corner of western England. Highlighted by cliffs and surrounding seas, Cornwall is quintessentially a farmer’s district, hauntingly beautiful, but lonely; unfortunately, I started to feel homesick soon. While e-mails and telephone conversations fulfill the basic need to communicate, often in fact very effectively, it was actually the ‘real’ letters from my grandfather written in his impeccable pen and ink that kept my home-country’s images so alive during those cold wintry evenings. |
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CLARE GALLAGHER b. 1978, Ireland DOMESTIC DRIFT Domestic Drift is concerned with everyday life - the ordinary activities, states of mind and conditions of existence that fill time outside the moments of drama and spectacle. I am interested in working with the sense of ordinariness inherent in the repetitive, habitual work of home while trying to appreciate the experience as simultaneously mundane and precious. |
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DEVIKA DAULET SINGH – CURATOR PHOTOGRAPHING THE STREET: AFGHANISTAN, BANGLADESH, INDIA, MALDIVES, NEPAL, PAKISTAN AND SRI LANKA Street photography has been one of the most practiced genres in photographic history. Today it is becoming more and more invisible because galleries prefer to present more individualistic concerns of the photographers. The debate between the photograph as a document and art has more or less reduced the street photograph to a prosaic understanding and appreciation. Furthermore, the last few decades have been beset by social and political upheavals, which have been documented in a frenzied way by photojournalists to sate the demands of the print media. The long-term impact of such upheavals on the ordinary man remains on the margins since the event is privileged over its consequences. Street Photography therefore assumes an important and historical role in viewing those changes. It carries the potential to transcend the conflicts of the times and present conditions of civil society as it progressed and evolved. |
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GRIGORIS DIGKAS b. 1984, Greece MEMENTO MORI Memento Mori is a photographic project researching the notion of exile in modern western societies, as defined by Edward W. Said. It is investigating the loss of identity and the literal, as well as metaphorical, displacement, that is caused by the oppression and anxiety of the modern harsh capitalistic society and the subsequent need to escape. Memento Mori is a documentation of my personal journey in between countries, ideas, cultures and politics, using instant photographs and text in a form of a diary. |
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JON MOORE b. 1951, USA CROSSINGS: ASCERTAINING THAT THE UNIVERSE IS FLAT According to ancient Maya beliefs, we live in a universe that is flat, with four corners and four directions, each assigned a color. The body of work entitled Crossings: Ascertaining that the Universe is Flat uses this idea as a point of departure. Juxtapositions are made on the basis of color and continuity at first... a theme and title then emerges and the finished compositions are left open to considerable subjective interpretation on the part of the viewer. |
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KANNAGI KHANNA b. 1989, India HOLLYWOOD In these days of discord, disharmony, conflict and competition, finding affinity between two entities, geographically far apart and no match to each other in respect of socio-economic or cultural semblance, is impossible. But that is what this photo series did and went on to find the impossible - A small slum in the heart of the posh new city of Ahmedabad called Hollywood. The actual name of the area is Gulbhaitekra but it has been popularly known as Hollywood for the last 4 decades for the reason that the women living here have a rustic beauty and glamour found to resemble that of Hollywood stars. |
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KANU GANDHI b. 1917, India KANU’S GANDHI An intimate and personal chronicle of the last ten years of Mahatma Gandhi’s life by his follower and grandnephew, Kanu Gandhi. |
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KURT HOERBST b.1972. Austria BIDESHI PHOTOSTUDIO When wandering through rural Bangladesh with a camera in your hand the sentence „Bideshi...chobi, chobi...! – Stranger! Take a photo of me!” will soon be heard all around. An unbelievably delighted eagerness to be photographed is definitely there. When Kurt Hoerbst met and fell for the village Rudrapur and its dwellers in 2005 the idea for the project BIDESHI Photostudio was founded. |
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LANA ŠLEZIĆ b. 1973, Canada A WINDOW INSIDE These box camera portraits of Afghan women were taken expressly to show them as the beautiful women they are without undermining the circumstances in which they live. Though Afghan women, still today, live under constant threat and fear, that relationship between beauty and tragedy is both unifying and haunting at once. |
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Laura El-Tantawy b. 1980, UK / Egypt I’LL DIE FOR YOU: SUICIDE IN RURAL INDIA I’ll Die For You explores the epidemic of farmer suicides in rural India. The work highlights the peculiar bond between man and land, a relationship unique to farmers given their dependence on the land for livelihood and the equal reliance of the land on farmers for survival. |
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LUCIDA OPEN STUDIO An open studio with a traditional painted canvas backdrop, a few props and daylight where visitors had their photographs taken, prints were made on the spot and the images became part of a permanent exhibit. |
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MARTIN BOGREN b. 1967, Sweden LOWLANDS This is where I grew up. When I was young, I wanted to get out. To something bigger, something more. The Village was cramped and adventure was waiting out in the world. And now, using a camera as my excuse I’ve come back — to search for memories. To understand why I wanted to leave. A few buildings have been torn down and some new ones have been built; yet everything is familiar. A street, a door, a crack in a stone stair and bushes by the folkpark. Fragments remind me of the past and memory fills in the blanks, making it all living and real again. I close my eyes and everything becomes clear. |
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NITIN UPADHYE, BORDERLESS WORLD FOUNDATION – CURATOR BASERA-E-TABASSUM The aim of Borderless World Foundation is to work for the welfare of communities in border areas. The founders of BWF started their work in Kashmir since 1997 and since 2002 BWF runs rehabilitation projects for orphan girls affected by the violence in Jammu and Kashmir in the frontier districts of Kupwara, Budgam, and Anantnag and Jammu. The photography workshops for the children of Basera-e-Tabassum are a part of just such an effort. The children felt a sense of freedom and empowerment discovering and expressing the world with their cameras. The photographs on display are a result of this ongoing initiative. |
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RAGHU RAI b. 1942. India BACKDROP SERIES The idea in this series was to give the subject a sense of privacy by placing him against the backdrop and yet include all that is going on in and around him so that the experience becomes wholesome. |
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b. 1973. Italy THE FIFTH DAY Life in the wild is disappearing at unprecedented rate. Massive human activities combined with the deep climate changes, represent the biggest threat to the living species. One in four mammals, one in eight birds and one third of all the amphibians are in the list of the endangered species and risk to disappear without specific conservation programs. All the species in these pictures are at risk of extinction or live in fragile habitats. |
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SAM HARRIS b. 1967, UK (now permanently residing in Australia) POSTCARDS FROM HOME Postcards from Home revolves around my domestic life and especially focuses on my two daughters Uma & Yali growing up. After several nomadic years, we migrated to Australia in 2008. It was with the restrictions of our migration process (keeping me from professional photography and travel) that home life became my only consistent opportunity to photograph and Postcards from Home was born/begun. |
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SAMAR S. JODHA – CURATOR EXPRESS/ASPIRE Conducted earlier in Dhaka, this photography workshop with underprivileged children from low-income families studying at the Dhaka Project in Bangladesh, was part of an on going series that Samar Jodha has been conducting with underprivileged children in Asia and Africa for the past 15 years. Each workshop goes beyond honing creativity of the children and helps raise self-esteem, impart life lessons and offer possibilities that are hard for the participants to otherwise imagine in their difficult circumstances. |
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SANJEEV SAITH b. 1958, India HAPPY GOODNIGHT These photographs were taken using a cellphone that my brother had left with me on a visit. This is all I have shot in the past few years after I put away my cameras when my parents began to need me at hand. I hadn’t thought that they would form an exhibit some day. “Happy Goodnight” is how my mother wished my father at bedtime. |
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SEAN LEE b. 1985, Singapore HOMEWORK I have always felt that the only kinds of work worth doing are the ones that we are utterly concerned about, whether in photography or otherwise. This is perhaps the reason why I turned to making images at home. There is a kind of quiet delight in photographing the members of my family. In many ways, the process of making pictures has made life at home a little less mundane and uneventful. Sometimes, it’s almost magical. Like the time when I made my parents hug each other. That was the first time I had ever seen them being so physically intimate. It was pure joy for me. |
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SELVAPRAKASH LAKSHMANAN b. 1978, India THE RURAL EXODUS Indian cities are bursting at the seams with millions of migrants who are forced to seek refuge, fleeing rural areas that no longer feed them. Crop failure, drought, flood, debts, and caste discrimination – the reasons for this rural exodus are many. |
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SIMON RIMAZ b. 1987, Switzerland KYTHIRA WATCHTOWERS Through these eminent haloed monoliths, Simon Rimaz reveals these enchanting towers. Huts disguised as prodigious palaces… frail girls perched on sturdy pedestals, hundredfold Lilliputians ... Women, finally! Women ... monumental women, monuments of women. Cyclopean creatures, huge buildings with perilous walls! Terrible ramparts along which glows the deadly goldenness – of its lights - the painted ornaments of a soul going barefoot. |
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SONAL KANTARIA b. 1978, UK NASEEB: TRAFFICKED Against the backdrop of an emerging India as a player in global markets, millions of people have been involved in human trafficking. Girls as young as 10 years old, frequently from the poorest backgrounds are being kidnapped and sold off to brothels, sometimes by their own families. This project explores the stories of a number of girls and young women who have been rescued from the brothels of Mumbai and Pune to be reintegrated into society and if appropriate to return home. In doing so it touches on the social, economic and cultural issues that affect contemporary India. |
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SUDHARAK OLWE b. 1966, India THE THRESHOLD While documenting the life of commercial sex workers in Kamathipura, the famed red-light light district of Mumbai, I learnt of the impending escape of a sex worker with the help of a client who wished to marry her. I pursued the story. Moments of transition are awaited eagerly photographers; transition temporally, spatially, emotionally and of any other kind. It is this moment of transition of a young girl from a prostitute to a respectable housewife is what I shot literally at the threshold of her brothel. It was to be the first in a series of documenting a life, its reformation, its value, and through it, the value of many more such lives. |
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SUMIT KATHURIA b. 1984, India BARE CODES In our (human) society we had always been know by our faces and names. But this new name, ‘UID number’, which is now compulsory, does not come from any system of human language and is not understood by people in general. Rather these numbers are such names which all of us will carry in the near future, to be validated by computers and not humans. In such a modern technology driven world we shall be known as mere codes. |
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SUNNY LAMBA b. 1984, India GOTIPUA: GOD’S LITTLE DANCERS In Oriya, “Goti” means “single” and “Pua” means “boy”. Gotipua dance is performed only by boys who dress up as female, usually under-15, as their bones are more flexible allowing them to do the acrobatics involved at ease. The images in the essay were taken during the famous Rath Yatra festival of Puri. I stayed with the kids in their gurukul and also travelled with them to Puri where they were invited to perform the dance for a hotel. |
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Vidura Jang Bahadur – Curator WORKSHOP WITH STUDENTS OF HABITAT LEARNING CENTRE The emphasis of this workshop, with underprivileged students of the Habitat Learning Centre conducted for the Delhi Photo Festival, was on narrative and storytelling. Held over two weeks we worked closely with the students exposing them to work from around the world, encouraging them to go out and take photos, helping them develop both technical skills and their potential to tell stories. That there were more questions at the end of the workshop than answers is encouraging. The students have shown a willingness to experiment outside the class and continue their engagement with photography. |
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ZHE CHEN b. 1989, China BEES They left their lives in the very wounds they had created for themselves. - Virgil (Roman poet, 70BC – 19BC) To jeopardize existence for existence itself: Bees recorded a marginalized group of people in China, who, faced with chaos, violence, alienation and irredeemable losses in life, feel propelled to leave physical traces and markings on their bodies, in order to preserve and corroborate a pure and sensitive mind from within. In 2010, having “The Bearable”(a photo series documenting my own self-infliction in the past 4 years) as my passport, I had the opportunity to develop a close relationship with some of these obstinate souls – the bees. |
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ZISHAAN AKBAR LATIF b. 1984, India SOLITARY SPLENDOUR Dhanji Anklesaria is my grandfather. I write this just a few days before I leave to visit him in Jhansi. I have grown up taking holidays to this little town. I try to help take care of him. I do what I can… Aside from being my mother’s strict father, aside from the secret stories I am told about his complicated Parsi familial past, and aside from the fact that he is old, reclusive, and alone, I feel close to my grandfather…because I see myself in him. |