essence
/reyyi
What survives in these images is not what stood in front of the camera. It is what stood behind it — the feeling carried into the frame and left there, distorted past recognition, because recognition was never the point. This is essence, as aham understands it: not the subject photographed, but the residue of a self that had no other way to surface.
Each series holds a single feeling, interpreted rather than documented, and abstracted until representation gives way to something closer to affect. The distortion is more than merely an aesthetic choice. It is the method — digital tools bent toward undoing the photograph's claim to record reality, to the extent that shows what remains is not what the eye saw, but what refused to stay hidden. Light and shadow are not composition here; they become a feeling that is not limited by the grammar of a language.
The photographic image here excavates something buried under the surface, brought up not by intention but by the accumulation of small unconscious decisions — a shift, a blur, a colour pushed past the point of likeness — until the image says more than it was asked to say. The gap between what can be expressed and what insists on being felt does not close in this process. It opens, and it opens onto whoever is looking.
waiting
2022
digital
photographic
images
We are all waiting for the big things in life, be it the dream career, the ideal partner, or just a break, while we go about our lives in shared spaces of the everyday. Between the starting point and the destination lies the truth of who we are. We exist in a perpetual state of becoming, suspended between what we are at present and what we romanticise about being. It is in the sterile light of airport terminals and the rhythmic pulse of traffic signals where this abstract yearning takes physical form, where physical pauses become portraits of the subconscious.
writing on the wall
2022
digital
photographic
images
Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to update the font, size and more. To change and reuse text themes, go to Site Styles.
wheels of time
2022
digital
photographic
image
Thirty years ago, the wheel was set in motion by a fundamental shift. While the dismantling of the state-controlled economy in favour of global free market was taking place, another structure was being dismantled in favour of a fairy tale. The shift in the economic structure created a superstructure of the 'Global Indian’, an identity built on mimicry and the promise of a borderless future. However, as the gears of time turned, the friction of economic inequality and the erosion of local anchors produced a psychological whiplash. Today, the superstructure has mutated into hyper-nationalism: a desperate attempt to reclaim a 'pure' postcolonial identity as a shield against the perceived coldness of the global market. We are witnessing the posthuman irony - where the very technology and markets that were supposed to unite us have provided the tools for a more rigid, tribal, and inward-looking definition of who we are.