Artist's Statement
For the past eight years, my creative efforts in photography have centered on my interest in exploring my Indian heritage. Growing up in the United States, isolated from Indian culture fostered the cultivation of imaginative fantasy about the land of my ancestry. My father died without telling me much about the culture in which he grew up or the story of his early life there. My knowledge of India ripened from exoticized Western media accounts. Having now made several trips to India, and collected a wealth of photographic images, videotape, and journal writings, I am shaping this material into distinct bodies of art work that document my experiences encountering Indian culture, and connect and contrasts my youthful fantasies of India with my adult experience building a relationship with the people and land of my ancestry.
During the summer of 2008 I spent six weeks in Mumbai, photographing vendors and casual laborers on the streets. These workers endure heat, dust, and police harassment as they sell their services and wares in makeshift stalls or hard fought patches of sidewalk. For a short time, I shared the textures of their lives as I trudged through the monsoon sodden streets carrying my 1950’s era 4×5 press camera, in search for subjects who would sit for their portraits at their places of work. For the most part, these images portray those who called out to me in greeting, as many vendors will do when they see a foreign visitor with a camera. Still making up a large part of India’s economy, these workers are ignored by the legions of pedestrians, until the bargains they offer are just too good to pass up, and then a sudden evening crowd gathers, jostling for space, fingering the goods, and driving hard bargains that enable the vendor to eat another day. I hope that my portraits will enable viewers to take another look and notice these often ignored individuals.
The next chapter of my own experience would bring me to Iselin, New Jersey and Jackson Heights, Queens, NY. Forty years ago, my father made the journey from India to Great Britain, where he finished college and married my mother, then to the United States, with my infant self in tow. At that time, there was no “Little India” within an American city or town, and my father had to start a new family and life without the comfort of any reminders from his own culture. This experience has changed for newer immigrants, as within the last 20 years, Indian enclaves have formed, to provide a cultural continuity and familiarity to the South Asian Diaspora. With this new body of work, I focus on the workers who have traveled from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to the South Asian ethnic enclaves in New York and New Jersey that make up “Little India.” I want to make portraits of these people as they create their own history and traditions in an adopted land. I can’t help but wonder how life for my own family would have been different, had such a community been available when we made the same journey.