Follow The Leading Light

The Indian Photo Festival puts forth four artists, among others, tunnelling into war’s underbelly, domestic quietude, existential dualities, and monsoon’s lonely memory

Nazanin Alipour Jeddi’s series ‘Lingering Shadows’ is a study in domestic quietude. Born in Tehran and now living in USA, she documents the everyday cadences of a woman’s life, played out in solitude — pouring tea, rinsing a dish, pausing mid-breath between tasks. “The kind of fatigue that accumulates softly — I wanted to honour that,” she says.

Rohit Chawla’s ‘Rain Dogs’, clicked during the pandemic in Goa. Chawla, known for his polished portraiture and decades in advertising, shares, “I’d been photographing people all my life. When the world shut down, I had no vocabulary for it.” He retreated to an abandoned room by Ashwem beach and began walking along straits of sand haunted by stray dogs whose sudden hunger mirrored his own disorientation. “I was framing my own vulnerability.”

Vikas Nama reaches for the threshold between presence and disappearance. His series ‘Binary — Duality of Being’ depicts what lives in the seam between light and dark. Trained at the Raghu Rai Centre and later in UK, Nama says, “Duality isn’t conflict for me, it’s coexistence.” He adds firmly, “I’m not interested in purity, I’m interested in the space where good holds its own shadow.”

New Delhi-based photojournalist Elke Scholiers has spent the last decade in conflict zones across West and South Asia. Her new project, ‘No Man’s Land’, burrows into the Kurdish Women’s Protection Unit’s underground world.

On display till Jan 4 at State Gallery of Art, Kavuri Hills, Madhapur.