Tuesday, October 16, 2012


  

Untitled Self Portrait

This is another cemetary in Argentina. I went there to visit. I often go to cemetaries to spend idle afternoons and sometimes I photograph there. Some of the sculpture here was very beautiful like this marble repose. I liked the wall and i walked up and down a few times. It gave me continuity for a while. Many people visit temples in different cities atleast in Asia they do. I always visit cemetaries. I find them very peaceful and calming. 



Untitled, 2012

This image was taken in the middle of the day in the cemetary in Buenos Aires this year. I placed the camera in the paved streets of this graveyard which is like a small neighbourhood with tombs instead of houses . i managed to appear as a ghost even in the middle of the day with bright sunlight. Sometimes i feel like i am in many different worlds. Sometimes i can not tell the time of day. 

Thursday, October 4, 2012


Untitled Self Portrait, (SP India 8)

This image is in a private chapel in goa. 

Monday, September 17, 2012

Untitled (Farmers, Yemen 2)



Untitled (Yemen Farmers 1)



Untitled (Japan 1)


Untitled (Keymaker, Brazil)


Untitled Self Portrait, (Cafe, Alexandria)



Untitled Self Portrait, (Movie Theatre)


Untitled Self Portrait, (Park Bench, Brazil)


Untitled (Cambodia, Tree)


Untitled Self Portrait (Buenos Aires, Reflections)



The Statue Seller, 1995


I made this picture from my car window.  The statue sellers work the traffic lights, moving from car to car before the light changes.  This image clearly shows the disparity of life in India, where the privileged and the poor rub shoulders on a daily basis.  Both women represent different lifestyles, yet they are both very attractive.  The amazing thing about India is that fashion and expression of style pervade class, which makes for very rich street photography.  In this particular case, both women are wearing beautiful fabrics and jewelry.  The woman outside the window is not a beggar, but someone on the other side of the glass with her own unique way of life.  This photograph could easily have been taken from outside in, and it would have been a different image with the same protagonists.

Untitled (SP 5)






Untitled (SP 2)



Untitled (SP 7)



Untitled Self-Portrait, 2012.


In this diptych, two seemingly unrelated images are brought together to create a single image.  The relationship is dually formalistic and conceptual.  The shape of the long, spiral staircase on the left is reflected in both the round clock and striped garment on the right, creating a visual connection.  The viewer is swept into the image by the railing on the left, then carried up and over to the second image.  The images together comment on the quality of time, as it is both static and infinite.  Like the staircase, it seems to travel forever into the future, yet a photograph captures a single instance on that timeline, as purveyed in the second photograph.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012



Untitled Self Portrait, 2012


This picture was taken in Alexandria, Egypt in a Greek-style cafe where I was having tea.  There is a duality in form between the spirals of the hair on the busts and the spirals in the embroidery of the dress.  The netting with the tiny lights covers the statues and the figure, making the subject a part of the visual scenery.  The tinting of the sepia tone gives the image a nostalgia.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012



Self Portrait from Japan, 2011.


This picture was taken right after the tsunami.  I was wandering  around in areas which were horribly destroyed and I came upon this beauty salon on the second floor of a building.  I don't think the owners had visited the property after the disaster so everything was lying around untouched.  I found boxes full of hair pieces, wigs, and jeweled pins.  My guess is that these items were used for brides, parties and more traditional gatherings.

Monday, September 10, 2012


Untitled

2000, silver gelatin print.


This is a photograph taken on a medium format camera.  In this image, the perspective of the camera lens shows the simple shape of a horse's back mimicking the grandeur of the architecture in the towers of the temple.  As your eye moves through the different levels of the image, from the horse to the tree to the temple in the horizon, the man-made structure is reduced through geometry to the simple state of nature, just as the form of the horse rises to the glory of the palace's towers.

Untitled from Tantric Self-Portraits, 2001.


This is a large silver gelatin image which I hand painted with acrylics.  This paradoxically abstract and literal piece represents my ideal lifestyle.  There are three shapes represented: a form cloaked in a shawl, a cracking yellow wall, and a pink inscribed slab inscribed with pictographs as if by a hermit who has renounced the material world.  Although this piece is very personal, its mystery, sensuality, and search for spiritual identity are elements that are relatable to many people.

“Am I in the picture? Am I getting in or out of it? I could be a ghost, an animal or a dead body, not just this girl standing on the corner…?”

-Francesca Woodman


Everybody should know the work of Francesca Woodman.  I never get tired of looking at her images.  The more I look at them, the more I see.  She was such a prolific artist for someone so young.  It makes me want to get up and make more pictures.  I like to study the geometry in her images.  She worked on so many different planes, making her images both poetic and constructed. 


I took this picture earlier this year in a friend's palace in Goa.  It was raining outside.

Friday, August 31, 2012


“…But each time your take a step, you discover yet another kind of space.  It’s not that you are reaching Nirvana – you don’t reach that.  You go closer to it.  There are layers and layers of things happening in the human mind, in the human spirit.  The possibilities are endless and total.”

-Raghu Rai

These women were photographed by me in Vrindavan, where they were sent with a one-way ticket by their families from Bengal when they became child widows.  They spend their entire day chanting or begging for alms in the streets.  It made me realize that social evils still attach themselves to contemporary society in India.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012


Tantric Self-Portrait in Jaipur, 37" x 37"

2000 - 2001, black and white photograph with oil, acrylic, gold, mud, and vermillion powder


In my work, I'm establishing contact with my inner self based on what I am feeling in that very moment... Even though we live in the moment, it is possible to have a picture of the future through meditation and by perceiving the direction in which things are going.  Through ritual and practice, it is possible to change anything.

This image was shown at the Admit One Gallery in New York in 2003, and resides in the permanent collection of the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Untitled, 35" x 35"

Mixed-media on silver gelatin print


This picture references the hand-tinted photographs that became a craze in India during the nineteenth century.  The layering of imagery in my work is partly inspired by street posters in Indian cities, plastered to the walls, gratified, and then re-applied.

This image was shown at the Admit One Gallery in New York in 2003, and resides in the permanent collection of the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.