The passing down of ancestral stories and anecdotes was often part of my growing up — an oral tradition preserving something that had already ceased to exist, a shared history passed hand to hand. One of these stories was always about my grandfather, who passed away before I was born. Growing up, I was told I had his habits, his interests, something of his way of moving through the world — walking fast and ahead on the street, an investigative way of looking at things. As a kid, I would see the tamrapatra kept in the house, an inscribed copper plate awarded by the Government of India for his involvement in the freedom struggle. The stories held other details too — his captivity, newspaper clippings, the fact that he was a teacher, a poet, and a man who kept a camera close and photographed his surroundings, sometimes his family. I have long been fascinated by his persona through these old photographs. What I knew of him came entirely through my father — a son's memory of his father, an attempt at translating a time and a life that had already passed.


My curiosity about my grandfather made me watch my father closely. I began photographing our ordinary shared life — the objects on his shelf, the rituals of the house, the shared silences, the
closeness and the distances between us. Living together, it occurred to me that to share a life and a space with anyone is also to become a mirror for each other — the rubbing off of personalities, the
things that wear off and the things that stay. In his last years, my father grew more invested in speaking his mind. He found a community of dissenting voices on social media, a space where he could write down his thoughts, share them with friends far away, and look, together with them, at the workings of the government. His posts brought him repeated, temporary bans for being openly critical of the state. He became my collaborator, and the link connecting three generations of men.


After my father's sudden death in 2024, these photographs became something else entirely. What had been a bridge became a record of what a bridge cannot cross. Every photograph that was once a record of reality is now only a messenger of absence. The objects that once belonged to a life — touched, used, worn — now lie under dust, witnesses to the same missing purpose. The home is the same home, but the intimacy that once lived in it — partial, complicated, real — can no longer be reached. Every moment I chose to document has become instead a reminder of a limit, a gap that documentation cannot close. What began as an act of proximity is now an archive of distance.



Press: Aperture Foundation, It’s Nice That, Critical Collective, Art in America, Foto Tallin, GUP Magazine, IMA Japan, See Zeen etc.