“What is photography?” — it was written on a sheet left at the end of the hall at the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery, NCPA. Sergio Valenzuela-Escobedo wanted everyone who came to his walkthrough to answer it before they left. I stood there for a while before I wrote anything down. It had been a long time since I’d thought out loud like that. I wasn’t trying to say anything clever. I was just asking myself, honestly, what the question meant to me.

I’d gone for the artist walkthrough of Mänk’áčen — Notes on Histories of Photography, part of NCPA’s bicentennial programming. Sergio holds a PhD in photography from the École nationale supérieure de la Photographie in Arles, and his research sits inside a question I’d never really thought about:

What did the camera actually do, in the hands of the people who first carried it into places that had never seen one?

The title of the show comes from a word he found in the writing of Martin Gusinde — mänk'áčen, a term used by the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego. It translates roughly to shadow-hunter, or shadow-catcher. Sergio used it to describe the photographic act itself, seen from the other side of the lens. Not the photographer's intention, but what the act looked like to the person standing in front of the box.

There was another phrase from the same body of research that Sergio talked about: toumayacha alakana — to look with a veiled head. It's how the Selk'nam described a man ducking under a black cloth to look through a camera. And a second one, from the Yanomami — noreshi toway — which means, more or less, to take a person's double.

I want you to sit with me for a second, because that is the part that shook me. This is the early nineteenth century — the camera was arriving in the Americas for the first time, carried by travelers, scientific missions, colonial administrators. And for the local communities, a dream was the one place a person's double was understood to live. Not a passing reflection, but an image of the self that existed outside the body, that could persist, that others might encounter. So when a stranger arrived with a box, disappeared under a cloth, and produced an image of them, which they never saw. It was someone reaching into the one place a self was understood to exist beyond the body, and taking something out of it. Many cultures banned the practice outright - some calling it “stealing their souls”. However, the western colonizers mostly did it anyway, and got away with it.

Today, when all of us are taking selfies constantly, without a second thought, that fear reads as almost quaint. But it wasn't quaint. It was a completely coherent response to a real violation, inside a worldview where the self and the image of the self were not casually separable the way we now assume they are.

This is the part I hadn't fully reckoned with before the walkthrough — the camera wasn't wandering into these encounters innocently, out of curiosity alone. Sergio's research is clear that it was doing a job. It mapped territory ahead of the colonies that would follow. It catalogued and studied the people being subjugated, the way you'd document a specimen. Perhaps quietly it drew a line between "civilised" western land and "wild" indigenous land — and made that line look like something the camera had simply found, not something someone had decided. The photograph wasn't just a record of the encounter. It was doing some of the work of the conquest itself.

Sergio told one story from the Fuegian encounters — the French Scientific Mission to Cape Horn, 1882, sent to photograph the transit of Venus and, while they were there, photograph the people too. What struck me wasn't the astronomy. It was something Sergio kept returning to across the whole hour, in one example after another: the sheer physical ordeal of it. These were long exposures — a person had to stand motionless in front of the box for seconds, sometimes a full minute or more, while a stranger worked under a black cloth a few feet away. Not a glance and a click. A held, forced stillness, for a purpose nobody had explained to them, with no idea what was being taken from them or what it would become. Sergio kept coming back to that stillness, and every time he did, it landed harder. Nobody in the historical record seems to have asked what it actually felt like, in the body, to stand there like that.

After the talk I found myself pushing back on Sergio — not disagreeing fully but genuinely asking him why he framed it the way he did. Because I'd sat through the whole hour and something in me still wanted to protect the idea that a photographer's intentions are good, as I kept putting myself in the photographer's shoes. He didn't budge. He said the historical record doesn't support that comfort. Camera in hand, again and again, across the Americas, Africa, Asia — the tool of documentation was also, structurally, a tool of dispossession. Not always by design. But by pattern, repeated so often it stops being incidental.

I thought, afterward, of the Afghan girl on the cover of National Geographic — a photograph that made a career, that the world still recognises on sight — a photograph she never chose to give, and whose consequences in her own life nobody much asked about. Cause and effect, quietly dropped from the story we tell about the image. We suit our own narrative and get away with it.

Talking to Tejal Pandey afterward, who heads the gallery, the thought extended itself somewhere less historical and much closer to home. She spoke about a recent protest in Mumbai — how photographs taken in the crowd, without anyone's consent, ended up being used to identify people afterward, and to come after them. Some of these people got into real trouble because of it. A ubiquitous camera, a phone, that people shoot without thinking twice. Especially in a digital world where all the photos and videos live online, and we have no control once we let them out into the wild, wild web. Something that will come back to haunt us, when a future Sergio sits down to study it as an archive.

I don’t think this makes photography guilty. I think it makes photography a form of contact, and contact carries weight whether or not the person holding the camera feels it. We like to talk about the good our images can do — and sometimes they do it. But we’re much less willing to sit with what they take, quietly, from the person who never got to answer the question standing at the end of that hall.

I still don’t have a tidy answer to what I wrote on that sheet. But I know I’ll carry the camera differently for having asked.

— Uday

Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: Marc Riboud — Acapulco, 1959

This is not one of Marc Riboud's well known photographs. It doesn't circulate the way his Eiffel Tower painter does, or the girl with the flower facing down rifles in Washington. But I keep returning to this because of its quietness and still has plenty to say.

Marc Riboud loosely scatters three figures in an arc across this frame. There's a guy asleep face down. Another seated, half-turned away. Then a dog curled up further back. Oh, and the chicken—we’ll get to that in a second.

You can practically feel the heat here. It’s heavy. It’s doing all the heavy lifting, making every single body just... give up. The sleeping guy is completely slack, melting right into the sand. The dog has surrendered to it, too. Even the upright man feels totally checked out, staring past the edge of the frame. He’s looking off past the edge of the frame, one hand raised and open, as if beckoning for something that isn’t going to arrive any time soon. A beer, maybe.

What actually glues this together is the shadow. That long, dark sweep from a coconut tree cuts right through the blinding white sand. It gives a loose, sprawling shot its actual bones. Without that single firm line, you’d just have three exhausted bodies stranded on a beach. Instead, your eyes have a place to land.

And now lets talk about the chicken. It’s just this tiny pop of white against the sleeping man’s dark hair. Totally incidental at first glance, but once you spot it, you can't un-see it. It makes you double-check the rest of the frame to see what else you missed.

There is no grand "decisive moment" caught here. No mid-air action shot. It’s the exact opposite of that high-energy photography, which is honestly why it’s so good to just sit back and stare at.

What do you notice when you stay with this image? There's no right reading — only what stays with you.

at the International Center of Photography (ICP), a few feet from a wall text explaining that this is Peter van Agtmael's book of the same name. The post-it isn't a visitor's joke. It's part of the book. Someone chose it, printed it, bound it that way, and shipped it out into the world with a face permanently covered by an apology.

I stood there staring at the cover before I paged through the book. Once I was done with the book, I went back to the cover thinking what must have gone through Peter’s mind when he was designing the cover of the book and the courage to make such a bold cover.

This was one of three shows I saw at ICP in the first week of July: Photobooks USA 2000–25, a survey of the American photobook over the last quarter century; Yves Saint Laurent and Photography, a large-scale look at four decades of fashion photography built around the house of YSL; and Fire Becomes Spirit, a single-artist show in ICP’s Incubator space, where Andrea Hernández Briceño is still in the middle of photographing the Huöttöja people of the Venezuelan Amazon.

Seen together, in that order, they stopped being three separate exhibitions. They became three separate moments in the same decision. Not the decision to press the shutter. The decisions that come after.

The photobook room made the point loudest. Nothing in it looked alike. Alec Soth’s Sleeping by the Mississippi sat open to a quiet color image of a boat on flat water, the kind of picture that wants space and silence around it. A few steps away, Todd Hido’s House Hunting held a house lit up against a night sky, printed large, printed loud. Philip-Lorca diCorcia’s a Storybook Life paired a strange domestic tableau with almost no text at all, letting the picture carry everything. And van Agtmael’s cover kept its post-it. Nearby, other books in the show used cloth, mixed paper stock, pages with more text than image. None of it read as decoration. It read as argument. Each photographer had looked at their own body of work and asked what object could hold it, and the answers didn’t overlap. The book wasn’t a container the pictures got poured into after the fact. The book was the last decision, and it was as considered as any single frame inside it.

“There’s no one right way or recipe or formula. A book should always listen to its own rules.” — Hans Gremmen

Walk backward from that, and the YSL show is where you find the decision before the decision. Nearly three hundred photographs spanning four decades, shot by every photographer who mattered at the time, Avedon and Newton and Penn among them, the work moving from black and white into color as the decades turned. Silver gelatin prints on the wall, full scale, the kind of print that makes you understand why anyone bothered with a darkroom at all. Brought back fond memories when I used to spend almost a day making silver gelatin prints of my own. None of them historic but equally important in my growth.

But the thing that held me longest wasn't a finished print. It was a wall-sized contact sheet, the same man in a suit and tie photographed frame after frame after frame, one small shift in expression or hand position separating each square from the next. Somewhere in that grid, a decision got made. One frame out of dozens got marked, printed, published, remembered. The rest went back into the sleeve. Looking at that wall felt like looking at my own contact sheets from back in my film days, except at a scale and with a cast of names that made the ordinary act of looking and choosing almost holy.

And then, backward again, to the beginning. Fire Becomes Spirit hasn't reached either of those decisions yet. Andrea Hernández Briceño is still shooting, still building a relationship with the Huöttöja community that has to hold before any book or wall of prints can follow. It's the least resolved of the three shows, and I mean that as description, not as a knock against it. It's traditional documentary work, made with real care, but it hasn't been tested by time the way a book on a shelf or a print on a museum wall has. I documented his work through the below videos, walking through the space, and I'd rather let you watch them and decide what you think than tell you what to feel about work that's still being made.

“When you get a book back from the binder, there is a feeling that this is real, like you’ve really done something. It’s the same feeling you get when you frame your work and hang it on the wall — it finally becomes something real.” — Alec Soth

Three floors, three stages. A project still becoming itself. A contact sheet full of near-misses on the way to the one that stuck. A shelf of books, each one built for what it needed to say, right down to a face nobody was allowed to see whole. I don’t think ICP planned it this way. I think, I just walked through in the right order.

The first was driving. I love it, and I don’t do it in India. The second was libraries. Not just any libraries. The ones with photobooks on the shelves, the kind I don’t have easy access to in Mumbai.

This time I made a point of visiting a few, in different towns. Trips I made with a car and without an itinerary.

The first stop was Grafton Public Library. Grafton was the town I moved to in 2014, the first place I lived when I came to Massachusetts. I moved to a neighboring town in 2018, and the library was under renovation right around then. I never got to see it finished.

So this time I went looking for it on purpose.

The library sits in the old town center, surrounded by trees and the kind of historic buildings that haven’t been touched in a hundred years. Inside, it was quiet in a way I’d forgotten. I sat for a while with a book, and through the window I could see the old town common, nothing moving except the leaves.

The book I'd picked up was local history, and it answered something I had wondered about for years. Why is Massachusetts spelled as a plural. There was a map inside, showing the different Indigenous peoples who lived across the land before it was Massachusetts. Not one group, several. The Nipmuc, the Wampanoag, the Pawtucket, the Pocumtuck, and, closer to the coast near the Great Blue Hill, a people called the Massachusett. The English took that one name, the name of the people near that one hill, and stretched it to cover everyone and everything in the colony. The plural came later, once the name had to hold more than it was ever meant to.

I liked that. A place named after the fact that it was many places first, even if the name itself started out belonging to just one of them.

Grafton had done what I’ve noticed a few libraries in this state do well. When they outgrow the old building, they don’t tear it down. They keep it, and build a new wing beside it or behind it. The old reading room stays intact, with its dark wood and its narrow windows, and the new addition opens up around it. History and expansion sitting next to each other instead of one replacing the other.

I saw the same thing at the Boston Public Library, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. And I saw it again at Provincetown.

There’s another thing about libraries here that I hadn’t fully appreciated before this trip. They’re networked across the state. If my local library in Westborough doesn’t own a book, they can borrow it from another one that does. Before this trip, I requested twelve to fifteen books I wanted to read while I was here, none of them on my own library’s shelves. All of them arrived, one by one, from towns I’d never been to.

Provincetown Public Library is unlike any library I’ve been inside. There is a full sized sailboat in the middle of the main hall. Not a model. An actual boat, the Rose Dorothea, suspended above the reading floor.

It sounds like a gimmick until you’re standing under it. Provincetown is a fishing town before it is anything else, and the library knows exactly what it is. A place can hold its own history in the room where you go to read, and let the two things talk to each other.

Upstairs, there’s a reading area that looks straight out over Cape Cod bay. I sat there longer than I meant to, the water doing what it does, the room silent except for someone turning a page somewhere behind me.

In Mumbai, my version of this is smaller. There’s the JoJo library in Dadar, and there’s my friend home, where his own shelves do the work a library would elsewhere. I keep a small collection of photobooks myself, kept deliberately small. Space is one reason. But the bigger reason is that I’ve always trusted the library system over ownership. A book doesn’t need to be mine for it to change how I see.

This trip broke that rule a little. I am coming back with a few books I’d bought that I really wanted.

Two visits mattered more than the libraries, though.

The first was to go see Lou Jones, in Boston. I went to show him a piece we’re running in the next issue of Between, Still, and to get his final approval on it. Lou’s studio is also his home, and walking through it feels like walking through a museum built out of one working life. Cameras and gear from the last fifty, seventy years, sitting where he last set them down.

In his living room hangs a large Art Kane print, the Harlem portrait. The famous one, the one everyone who knows jazz photography has seen in reproduction. Seeing it full size, on his wall, at that scale, was different.

I asked him how he archives everything, the negatives, the slides, decades of them. He walked me into a room built for exactly that. Cabinets the size of the room itself, holding tens of thousands of slides and negatives. I stood there for a while, not saying much. It’s one thing to know a photographer has a long archive. It’s another to stand inside it.

He pulled out some of his own portraits and told me where each one was made. Not the technical story, the human one, who was in the room, what happened before and after the shutter went. I could have stayed for hours.

The second visit was to Richard Sharum, at his new home in upstate New York. Richard and I go back two decades, to photography classes we took together, long before either of us knew what we’d do with it.

I went partly for the visit, partly to get his new book, Spina Americana. Richard’s shelves are full of documentary work, mostly photographers who spent years on a single place or a single question. Talking to him in his own house, surrounded by that collection, was its own kind of library visit.

Richard ended up gifting me a copy of the book himself. One of the drawings inside is by his daughter, Lillian, and she signed it for me standing in their kitchen. Richard told me only one other copy carries her signature, the very first one he ever sold. Mine is the second.

He’d just come back from an exhibition in Germany, and we spent a good part of the evening on that, and on his experience with publishers over the years. His third book, American Homicide, comes out later this year. But the conversation kept circling back to something bigger than any one book. He’s convinced the publishing system, as it stands, is a scam. Photographers put years and their own money into a book, and most of them come out of it having lost more than they made. He isn’t just frustrated by this. He’s actively trying to do something about how publishers deal with photographers, at a structural level, not just for his own next book but for the ones coming after him.

I’ve known Richard for more than 20 years, and I’ve rarely seen him talk about anything with that much conviction.

Driving between all of this, I kept thinking about what two years away does to a place, and to you. The libraries hadn’t changed as much as I expected. Grafton had simply finished what it started before I left. But I had changed enough to notice things I might have walked past before. The plural in a state’s name. A boat inside a reading room. What it means to stand inside someone else’s archive of fifty years.

None of this needed to happen anywhere else. It happened because I went looking, in a car, on my own time, the way I used to.

Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: James Nachtwey — Bosnia-Herzegovina, Gornji Vakuf, 1993

I missed May’s edition of this series. Too many things pulling in different directions. We’re back now, and this month felt like the right time to sit with someone whose work has meant a great deal to me.

Early in my photography journey, James Nachtwey was the photographer I returned to when inspiration ran dry. His documentary, War Photographer, showed me not just how he worked, but why, and that stayed with me. He has covered war zones and conflict across the world, documented atrocities most of us will never witness. And yet, by all accounts, he remains an unassuming and gentle human being. That tension has always made his work harder to look away from.

It is very hard to pick a single image from a vast library of his award-winning work. But this one stopped me.

The frame gives you no casket. No body. No direct evidence of death. And yet grief is everywhere — in every face, every posture, every hand. That absence is part of what makes this image remarkable. Nachtwey didn’t need to show you death to make you feel it.

The eye finds the old man first — hands clasped, mouth open, somewhere past tears. And then the frame opens out, each pair sealed in their own version of the same loss. The grief doesn’t announce itself. It settles. You don’t need to know whose funeral this is to feel the weight of it.

Each pair is at a different stage of grief — and Nachtwey has caught them all in the same breath.

What do you notice when you stay with this image? There's no right reading — only what stays with you.

I was there for research, for Between, Still. But somewhere in the middle of it, something else happened.

Three books stayed with me long after I left.

The first was the Phaidon 55 on Lewis Hine — a small, pocket-sized thing that contains one of the most consequential bodies of documentary work ever made. Hine photographed the children in the mills of North Carolina, the coal breaker boys of Pennsylvania, the immigrant families arriving at Ellis Island in 1905. He used a flash. In those dark spaces — tenements, factory floors, holding rooms — the flash didn’t just illuminate. It insisted.

Look at this. Look at this face.

What I kept returning to was a single detail. Hine was meticulous about noting the ethnic origins of his subjects. He rarely recorded their names.

Dignity without identity. The face preserved, the name lost. A century later, we look at the Italian mother outside the detention cell, holding her child, and we still don’t know who she was. The photograph outlived the person and never knew her fully. That is both its power and its sorrow.

Hine photographed because he wanted the law to change. And it did. His images contributed directly to child labor reforms in the United States. He was, in the most literal sense, a photographer with a purpose beyond the frame. What he made was evidence. What remains is something harder to name.

The second was David Campany’s On Photographs — a different kind of book altogether. Where Hine moved through the world with a mission, Campany moves through photography with a question: what do we actually do when we look?

The book is full of his readings of single photographs: Orkin, Winogrand, Meyerowitz, others, and what he keeps finding is that photographs are unstable things. They confuse as much as they reveal. They conceal as much as they show. The meaning shifts depending on who is looking, and when, and what they carry into the room.

The Garry Winogrand passage stopped me. After his death in 1984, he left behind 2,500 rolls of undeveloped film and around 432,000 exposures. In his final years, he had stopped looking at the images he was making. He was photographing, but no longer seeing. Others have been going through that archive ever since, choosing, printing, deciding what Winogrand meant long after Winogrand himself had left the room.

There is a Joel Meyerowitz photograph in the book that I had never seen before. Cumberland Farms, Provincetown, 1976.

A gas station at dusk, the fluorescent lights of the canopy reflected in the metal roof, the sky turning the color of old copper. I stood at that exact Cumberland Farms in 2023. I remember that parking lot. And there it was, photographed forty-seven years before I arrived. Meyerowitz already having seen it, already having understood something about it that I am still working out.

That is what Campany means when he says our second or third response to a photograph will not be quite the same as our first. Some images keep opening.

The third book was Karsh: Beyond the Camera. And it gave me something the other two hadn’t. A window into the room itself. Into what it takes to make someone truly seen.

Karsh wanted his subjects mentally active. Not relaxed, present. He would have tea with them the day before. Listen to them speak. Watch them perform. So that when they sat for him, there was something alive to photograph.

The Churchill story is the one everyone knows. The cigar removed without permission. The fury on the great man’s face. The photograph that made Karsh internationally famous overnight. But what I found more interesting was what the book says around it, that Churchill told Karsh he had made a roaring lion stand still. And that this became Karsh’s story to tell for the rest of his life, at every dinner, to every head of state and film star who sat in front of his camera. The backstory, charming and true, threatened to become larger than the photograph itself.

The Einstein sitting is quieter and cuts deeper. Most photographers who approached Einstein wanted the famous image everyone already knew, the wild white hair, the symbol of genius. Karsh didn’t want that. He was after something else. During the sitting, he asked Einstein whether he was optimistic about the future of mankind. Einstein said no. And then: that if mankind fails to find a harmonious solution, the disaster that follows would be on a dimension beyond anyone’s imagination. Karsh believed he had found, in Einstein’s eyes, a man who was neither beyond hope nor beyond despair. That is where he pointed his camera. Not at the icon. At the person underneath.

That instinct to resist the obvious image and go looking for what is actually there, is the hardest thing in portraiture. And perhaps in all of photography. Karsh’s instruction to himself, which the book returns to again and again:

First get the eyes right, then see what they will relinquish.

I took the commuter rail to the Griffin Museum of Photography that evening, where a student show was on the walls and Ed Kashi was launching his new book - “A Period in Time”.

The student work was from Winchester High School. Young minds, barely started, already asking serious questions. One student was mapping depression. Another was examining our submersion in screens and social media. Another was processing the loss of her grandfather. A student named Eva Albert had made a series of collages, film photographs of Boston in winter, split open, with forest and trees breaking through. Nature cracking the city. The photographs were made on a Minolta XE-7. She has been in darkroom photography for two years.

I stood in front of her work for a while. She is asking, in her way, the same questions Hine was asking in 1908. What does the world owe us? What are we losing? What is breaking through?

Then spoke.

I have admired his work for a long time. That evening he walked us through decades, Northern Ireland, the Iraqi Kurds, the Niger Delta, Syria. The kind of long-form documentary work that takes years and asks everything of the photographer. He talked about adapting, learning video, learning to tell stories across forms, staying relevant without losing the thread of what he was actually trying to say.

But the two projects that stayed with me were the intimate ones.

He documented his father-in-law Herbert living with his family. Part of a larger project on the Sandwich Generation, those years when you are simultaneously caring for the generation above you and raising the one below. Herbert’s portrait, shown during the talk, was one of those photographs that you cannot look at briefly. It holds you.

And then there was the photograph of Maxine Peters, a senior woman, passing away in her bed surrounded by her family and friends. I could almost feel her soul leaving her body in that image. I don’t know how else to say it. The grain, the quiet, the hands, the faces of the people around her, all of it together made something that photographs rarely make. A threshold. The feeling of being present at something that cannot be undone.

I took the commuter rail home thinking about the shape of the day.

In the morning, a child in a cotton mill in North Carolina, 1908. A boy selling newspapers on a street corner in St. Louis, 1910. Faces the law was not yet ready to protect.

In the evening, a woman at the end of her life, held by the people who loved her.

And in between. Campany asking what we actually see when we look.

Photography at its best is not about the photograph. It is about what the photograph makes you feel in the chest when no one is watching you look.

I don’t know that any one book teaches you that. But a day like this one comes close.

Your photographs will outlive you.

Not in the way a print tucked in an archive outlives its maker. In a more immediate, more permanent way. Every image you post publicly becomes part of a searchable, indexable body of work that accumulates quietly, year after year, attached to your name. Most photographers — especially those starting out — don’t think about it this way. They think about the next post, the next festival, the next deadline. They are not thinking about what all of it adds up to, or that it stays.

This is the thing I want to talk about. Not to scold anyone, but because I wish someone had said it to me earlier: the work you put out now is the introduction you will give yourself for years to come.

The Festival Trap

If you spend any time on Indian photography feeds, you will notice something. A large proportion of what gets called street photography is festival photography. Holi. Kumbh. Wari. Ganesh Chaturthi. And within each festival, a particular image that everyone is after — the Ringan at Wari, with Warkaris on horseback moving in circles, is a good example. Visually striking, yes. But every photographer who went there has that shot. What does yours add?

I want to be careful here. Festivals are not a lesser subject. Raghu Rai photographed Kumbh Mela and produced some of the most extraordinary work of his career. The subject is not the problem. The approach is.

When a festival begins, many photographers descend on it with the same frame in mind — the spectacular image, the riot of colour, the decisive crowd moment. The goal is the image everyone is going to want to see. And because everyone is chasing the same image, the images all look the same. Different angles of the same thing is not a different vision. It is the same vision with minor variations.

What makes a photograph interesting is not what it shows. It is what it asks.

A street photograph, to me, is something that does not resolve cleanly. It opens rather than closes. It makes you look twice, not because it is beautiful, but because something in it resists explanation. Festival photography, in its most common form, does the opposite — it delivers exactly what you expected, in the most visually satisfying way possible. That is a skill, and I don’t dismiss it. But it is not the same as developing a photographic vision.

The harder question — the one that actually builds a photographer — is: what do you see? Not what everyone else is photographing. Not what performs well. What makes you stop? What do you find when you stop chasing the obvious frame?

I have been to both Kumbh and Wari. Here are some of the frames I came back with. None of them are the Ringan. None of them are the sacred dip at dawn.

These images ask questions. I am not sure I have the answers. But that uncertainty is, for me, where photography begins.

The Competition Question

I don’t submit to most photo competitions. I want to be honest about that, and honest about why.

Art is subjective. When an image wins a competition, it tells you that a particular set of judges, on a particular day, responded to that particular image. It does not tell you that the image is good. It does not tell you what is strong about your work, what is weak, or where you should go next.

A win without understanding is just noise with a badge attached.

This is especially true of the competitions that seem to appear overnight — built around social media followings, free to enter, and built to generate engagement for someone else’s account. The photograph that wins such a competition is often the one that reads well at thumbnail size. That is not the same thing as a photograph that holds up.

I am also cautious about what entering these competitions does to how you see your own work. When you begin editing for a competition — selecting images based on what you think a jury might respond to — you are already editing away from your own instinct. You are replacing your eye with an imagined eye. That is a habit worth resisting, especially early in your practice.

There is one significant exception, and it matters. The World Press Photo judging process is worth studying — not necessarily to enter, but to watch. Their jury is made up of serious professionals, the rounds are structured and transparent, and in earlier years they made parts of their live judging available to watch. Seeing experienced editors and photographers disagree in real time about the same image — debating context, ethics, visual quality, representation — is a masterclass in how photographs are actually read. That is the kind of engagement with your work that a results-only announcement will never give you. I used to watch these sessions regularly in the 2010s. They are still available on the World Press Photo YouTube channel and I recommend them.

The question to ask about any competition you consider entering is simple: what will I learn from this, win or lose? If the answer is nothing, the entry fee — whether money or time — is better spent elsewhere.

What You Are Actually Building

I am not arguing that you should stay off social media, or avoid festivals, or never enter a competition. I am arguing for something more basic: know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

If you are using festivals to practice — to work on light, timing, proximity, the speed of your eye — that is a legitimate use of the subject. But know that it is practice, and treat it accordingly. Not every frame of practice needs to be posted publicly.

If you are entering competitions to push yourself toward deadlines, to force an edit, to develop the discipline of selecting and sequencing — that is also legitimate. But know that the result tells you almost nothing, and seek real feedback alongside it.

What builds a photographer over time is not the size of your feed. It is the quality of your seeing.

And seeing takes time — quiet time, away from the pressure to post and be seen. It takes sitting with your contact sheets. Printing your work and laying it on a floor. Showing it to people whose judgment you trust and listening to what they say.

Your digital body of work will be there long after you have forgotten making most of it. It is worth being intentional about what that body of work says about how you see the world.

The photographers who stand out are not the ones who posted the most. They are the ones who developed a vision — a way of looking that is unmistakably theirs — and had the patience to let it emerge before asking the world to validate it.

See better first. Be seen later.

I’d love to know your experience with this — whether you’ve felt the pull of the festival circuit, or found competitions useful or otherwise. Leave a comment below or reply to this note.

Photography is a solitary act. Just you, a frame, and whatever is happening in that sliver of world in front of you. I have always loved that about it. The quiet concentration of it.

But there is more to this practice than the moment of pressing the shutter. There is the long, slow work of becoming — and that, I have learned over more than two decades, cannot happen alone. It needs friction. Other eyes. Honest voices. Time spent looking at work you did not make.

Here are four things that have helped me grow. None of them require a new camera.

Putting Your Prints on the Table

I recently read a piece in The Week by Nitin Rai, written as a tribute to his father, the great Raghu Rai. One passage stopped me.

He describes being four or five years old, watching his father come home in the evenings with a set of prints. He would spread them on the table. Friends would gather — painters, photographers, editors — and they would talk. Jatin Das. Himmat Shah. Kishore Parekh. What worked and what did not. No flattery. Just looking.

That room was a kind of school.

What struck me reading it was how rare that practice has become. Most photographers today shoot, process, and share — straight to a screen, straight to a feed. Likes arrive in minutes. They feel like response. They are not. They are a signal that the image was noticed. That is different from the image being seen.

The early Magnum photographers understood this too. Cartier-Bresson, Capa, Doisneau — they talked constantly. Shared images. Pushed back on each other. Magnum itself grew out of those conversations: a formal structure built around the belief that photographers needed each other, not just assignments.

What Raghu Rai was doing in that room — and what HCB’s circle did in Paris — was something few of us make time for today. Honest, sustained looking with people whose judgment we respect.

I have tried to keep this practice alive. In Mumbai, I organize small gatherings — at my house, or a friend’s — where photographers bring work to share. I push for prints. There is something about holding a photograph, laying it beside another, moving them around on a table, that digital screens cannot replicate. You see differently. The work either holds or it doesn’t. You can tell quickly when you are looking at the real thing.

During my years in Boston, I was part of a group run by photographer . It was more structured. At the start of each year, we each wrote our photography goals — and how we planned to reach them month by month. When we met, we checked in. We helped each other through creative ruts, technical blocks, questions about how to present and publish work. The group had portrait photographers, wedding photographers, documentary and street photographers. Different visions, one conversation.

That group helped me grow into my first large-scale exhibition — work shown in a gallery for two months. I don’t think that would have happened without those meetings.

Find your table. Put your prints on it. Invite people whose eyes you trust.

The Print as Teacher

I have written before about my relationship with prints, but it bears saying again here in a different way.

When you hold a print, something changes. The tactile quality of paper — its weight, its surface — slows you down. You cannot scroll past it. You have to sit with it.

And when you spread prints across a floor or a wall, you begin to see things that remain invisible on a screen. Patterns emerge. Connections you hadn’t noticed. A photograph you thought was weak turns out to belong somewhere specific in a sequence. Another that looked strong in isolation loses itself in a group. The print teaches you how your work breathes together.

It also has a way of showing you when you’ve done too much. Screens invite overworking — another adjustment, another crop, another pass through the shadows. But a print held in your hands at arm’s length has its own authority.

The print teaches you when to stop.

Ansel Adams considered the print the culmination of the entire photographic process. He wrote an entire book about it — simply titled The Print — devoted to the idea that the image you make in the field is not yet the photograph. It becomes the photograph in the making of the print. He spent half a day sometimes on a single exposure decision in the darkroom. The print was where his seeing was completed.

The Magnum photographers had a different but equally instructive practice. In the early days of the agency, photographers applying for membership were judged not by their finished work prints but by their contact sheets — because those small, unedited rows of frames revealed how a photographer thought. Cartier-Bresson famously reviewed these sheets by rotating them in every direction, upside down, sideways, completely divorced from subject matter — looking only at the formal relationships within the frame.

That is print as an act of honest seeing. It is available to all of us, at any size. 4x6 inches is enough. The point is to make the work physical, to hold it, to let it tell you what it is.

The Voice You Need to Find

Like any art form, photography is largely a solitary and interior practice. I value that. You in the world, with your camera, making sense of what you see.

But there comes a point where the interior conversation needs an interlocutor.

A mentor is someone who knows your work deeply enough to tell you what you cannot tell yourself. Not a teacher in the formal sense — though formal study has its place. A mentor is someone who holds your vision and your ambition at the same time. Who knows the gap between them and cares enough to say so.

Early in my journey, I took classes at a community college in Texas. Later, I sought out photographers I admired through workshops. Those workshops gave me more than I expected, and not just from the photographers who ran them.

Share your work. Share your uncertainty. That sharing is not a weakness. It is what makes the work stronger.

The workshop assignment is a strange and useful thing. Ten photographers are given the same brief — the same street, the same instruction, the same hour. And ten completely different photographs come back. That alone is worth the price of admission. You see how another person, standing in the same world, finds an entirely different frame. You realize that what you thought was the only possible interpretation was just yours. And that realization is clarifying, not destabilizing. It tells you something about your instincts — what you are drawn to, what you automatically exclude, where your eye naturally goes. The other participants teach you as much as the mentor does.

After more than twenty years in this field, there are still a small number of people I return to regularly — people who know my strengths, know where I tend to hide, and will not let me get away with the comfortable version of a project.

Cartier-Bresson had André Lhote, the Cubist painter who taught him composition and gave him the phrase that became his creed: “No one enters here but geometricians.” He had Robert Capa, who told him bluntly to stop calling himself a Surrealist and embrace photojournalism. Capa was mentor and conscience both. When Capa died in 1954, HCB was devastated not just by the loss of a friend but by the loss of that voice.

You don’t need someone who makes the same kind of photographs you do. You need someone who sees your work clearly and respects what you are trying to do with it.

Portfolio reviews and workshops are good places to begin. Show your work to half a dozen people. You will know when something resonates — not because they say the right things, but because they ask the questions you have been avoiding.

Work You Did Not Make

Looking at other photographers’ work is its own form of education — but only if you look slowly enough.

A feed of images is not the same as a photobook.

The book has been sequenced. Designed. Every turn of a page is a decision. The artist has thought about why this photograph follows that one, what the silence between them means, how the work moves from beginning to end. Holding that in your hands teaches you to think about your own work in those terms.

In Mumbai, we are fortunate to have Jojo Library, with a collection of photobooks that rewards serious time. I encourage you to use it.

Exhibitions offer something else. When you attend an artist talk and hear a photographer describe their choices — not just what they photographed, but how the space was organized, why certain images were printed at certain sizes, what was left out — you begin to understand what a completed body of work actually requires. The photographs are only part of it.

In November 2025, I attended an exhibition by Pedro Costa at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum called Inner Vision. The gallery was set up as a maze-like structure, entirely dark. You moved from one image or audio-visual presentation to the next as if entering different worlds. It was closer to theater than to a conventional gallery. The experience stayed with me.

Last week, I attended an artist walk with Abhishek Khedekar at the Dilip Piramal Gallery at NCPA, for his exhibition Tamasha. One piece in the show was a large canvas — six feet by four — hung from a single nail at the top, so it folded over itself and drooped. During the walk, Abhishek explained that the photograph showed the drummer who greeted visitors at the entrance of the performance tent he had documented. The canvas, left to hang this way, asked you to lift it — to unfold it yourself and enter, the way you would enter the tent. The audience became participants.

That kind of thinking about presentation cannot be learned from a screen. You have to be there.

Photographic growth does not happen in isolation. It happens in the space between your work and someone else’s eyes. Between the image on the screen and the print in your hands. Between what you already know and what the right book, the right room, the right conversation, will show you.

The camera is only the beginning.

What has helped you grow as a photographer? I’d love to hear — reply to this note or leave a comment below.

I had photographed the Mariamman festival the previous year and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. Not because it wasn’t visually rich — it was. But the ritual involves a great deal of piercing, and I found myself deeply uncomfortable shooting it. There is a difference between bearing witness to something and pointing a camera at it, and I hadn’t resolved that difference for myself.

The Mariamman festival runs across Mumbai for nearly three weeks, from mid-April through the first week of May. Celebrations happen in neighborhoods all over the city — one after another, overlapping, each with its own community and character. This year, I had skipped every single one.

Then my friend — photographer, workshop mentor, someone whose eye I trust — told me about a specific celebration at Cheeta Camp in Trombay. One of the last of the season, falling on May 1st, a public holiday in Mumbai. He said this one was different. That there was an extended preparation beforehand, a whole world before the procession began, and that I would respond to it. He convinced me to go.

I am glad he did. I came back with close to 500 frames. And then the harder work began.

This post is about that work — not the shooting, but the editing. How you look at a large set of images and decide what stays, what goes, and in what order.

The first cull: from 500 to 24

The initial pass through 500 frames is less about selection and more about elimination — obvious failures, missed focus, frames where nothing resolved. Set them aside without sentiment.

What remains after that pass still tends to be too many. The second cull is harder because now you are choosing between images that all work to some degree. This is where your instincts about the story start to matter more than technical assessment.

I came down to just over 20 images that I felt could collectively tell the story of the day. You can see them in the Lightroom screenshot below — the starting point before the sequencing work began.

Starting with a feeling, not a formula

David Alan Harvey has a line I return to often, both while shooting and while editing:

“Don’t shoot what it looks like, shoot what it feels like.”

It applies equally to sequencing. The question I asked before placing a single image was not what I wanted to show, but what I wanted the viewer to feel moving through the photographs.

The answer came quickly: begin slowly, peak in the middle, end slowly. A breath in, a full intensity, a breath out. The festival itself moves that way — devotion begins in quiet preparation, rises into something that defies ordinary experience, and then the body slowly returns to itself.

That emotional shape became the spine. Every editorial decision came back to it.

One more thing shaped my approach: I had stayed away from shooting the actual piercings at close range. That discomfort was real and I chose to honor it. What I had instead were the before, the during, and the after — preparation, procession, trance. In some ways that constraint made the sequence more interesting. The essay moves around the intensity rather than into it.

The choices that required the most thought

The temple interior. Early in the edit I had included an interior shot of the Shakthi Mariamman Temple — the signage visible, the space filled with worshippers. I included it for a practical reason: it grounded the geography, gave the viewer a sense of place. It was also one of my favorite images from inside the temple. But when I looked at it honestly within the sequence, it was the weakest image compositionally — dark, cluttered, people’s backs to the camera. The preparation image at the very beginning was already doing the work of location and context, and doing it with far more warmth and story. Two images cannot occupy the same role in a sequence. The temple image was cut. It will find a better home in a different context — perhaps accompanying a written piece about the festival itself.

Two images of the sacred in traffic. I had two photographs of the procession moving through the streets — a kavadi bearer walking past motorcycles and cars, and pilgrims passing a city bus carrying an amusement park poster. Both placed the sacred inside the everyday. But the bus image does something the traffic image doesn’t: those smiling, carefree faces on the advertisement create an active counterpoint. The contrast isn’t just visual — it’s tonal. Ordinary happiness set against extraordinary devotion, side by side on a Mumbai street. The kavadi bearer in traffic is a strong image, but the city around him is simply neutral. The bus gives you something to feel the gap between.

The boy on his father’s shoulders. This was the hardest cut. One of my favorite images from the day — a father carrying his young child on his shoulders, the child looking out over the procession with wide eyes. The layering of generations, tenderness held inside intensity — it felt important. But the image I placed instead, the dense crowd with the young man’s direct gaze over his offering pot, was compositionally cleaner and flowed better into its neighbors. The father-and-child image disrupted the sequence at the point where it needed to be building inward. I couldn’t find a place for it that didn’t cost something elsewhere. It remains one of my favorite photographs from the day — just not from this essay.

The grandmother and baby. I had originally planned to close with this — a grandmother holding a baby, beaming. Beautiful photograph. But the rest of the sequence lives inside the experience of devotion, bodies under it and returning from it. The grandmother and baby exist outside that world entirely. Ending there felt like stepping out of the room rather than settling into it. The stronger close was the woman in trance being steadied by hands around her — community as care, the body held after surrender. That is a complete thought. The grandmother photograph will find its place elsewhere.

The boy between the two water images. A late placement decision that worked. The two water images are both high-energy, and placing them directly together created a wall with nowhere for the eye to rest. The boy — that sideways glance, the faint curiosity in it — becomes a breath between them. And the direction of his gaze pulls you naturally into the cascade that follows.

The final 12

Substack limits galleries to nine images, so the sequence is split across two. The last image in the first gallery — the boy glancing sideways — was placed there deliberately. His gaze carries you across into the second.

What this edit taught me

Sequencing is not arrangement. It is argument. Every image makes a claim on the viewer’s attention, and you are responsible for what they encounter before and after it. A strong image in the wrong position can break a sequence. A modest image in the right position can do essential work.

Coming back to Harvey’s words — shoot what it feels like — the same is true of editing. The sequence that works is not the one where every image is technically the strongest. It is the one where the feeling carries, unbroken, from the first frame to the last.

The images I was most attached to were not always the ones that served that feeling. Letting go of the father-and-child image was genuinely difficult. So was the grandmother. So was the temple. But the essay became more itself without them.

And starting with the preparation scene — which I had almost left out of the initial set entirely — turned out to be one of the important decisions I made. The whole sequence earned its intensity because it had a quiet beginning.

I almost didn’t come to this festival. I am glad Suresh pushed me. The day gave me more than I expected — not in spite of my discomfort, but partly because of it. The edit reflects that. It is a sequence about devotion seen from a respectful distance, moving around the edges of something it cannot fully enter.

The festival is over. The images remain. This is how I decided what they mean together.

All photographs from the Mariamman festival, Cheeta Camp, Trombay, Mumbai.

Do you think about sequencing when you edit your own work, or do you tend to present images individually? Leave a comment below.

Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: Fred Herzog — Boat Scrapers, Vancouver, 1964

I’m not interested in explaining this photograph or fixing its meaning. Instead, I want to stay with it—to look slowly at what’s present, what’s hinted at, and what the frame withholds. Like most photographs that endure, this one doesn’t offer answers easily. It asks for time.

A friend introduced me to Fred Herzog’s work a few years ago, and I’ve admired it since. But it was a recent YouTube video on his retrospective that gave me the push to sit down with his images deliberately, with real purpose. Herzog shot in Kodachrome slides — which was rare for his time, when most photographers were working either in black and white or on color negative film. That choice gave his images an almost painterly quality that reminds me of Saul Leiter and, in a different way, Stephen Shore — though Shore was working with large format cameras, shooting on 4x5 and 8x10. There is something about that Kodachrome palette — warm, layered, slightly unreal — that makes you feel the image has been steeped in time before you even begin to look at it. This photograph is a good example of why.

The first thing this photograph does is make you recalibrate scale. The ship’s hull isn’t a backdrop — it is the world. It crowds the frame, curves and looms, and the two men suspended against it feel momentarily like an afterthought. And then, slowly, the image inverts itself. You stop seeing a big ship with small men, and you start seeing two men who have simply made this vast metal wall their place of work for the day. Ordinary. Unhurried. Completely at home.

The shadow of these two men falling on the hull — larger than life — also grabs my attention and makes me wonder if the importance of their work is scaled as big as the hull of the ship itself.

The smoke in the background is the detail I keep returning to. It rises dark and certain against a soft sky, and neither of the workers glances at it. There is something in that indifference — not negligence, but a kind of practiced acceptance — that feels true to how people actually inhabit the world they work in. The ominous and the ordinary share the frame without drama. Life carries on at the end of a rope, with a paint bucket, against a rusting hull.

What stays with me is the gentleness of it. A photograph set in a shipyard shouldn’t feel this calm. But it does. The men are simply there, doing what needs doing, suspended between the water and the sky, as if this is exactly where they are meant to be.

I’d be curious to know what you notice if you spend a little time with this photograph.
There’s no right reading—only what stays with you.

Not in the photographs themselves — the work with patience and depth was still being made, still arriving quietly in the world. But the spaces where it lived had changed. Scroll far enough through any feed and the images begin to blur into one another — similar in light, similar in subject, similar in the feeling they reach for. Transient by design.

I found myself craving something else. For the past several months I've been building something separately from this newsletter — a project that grew out of a feeling I couldn't shake: work that asked to be held rather than passed. Writing that accompanied photographs with the same seriousness the photographs deserved. A space that felt less like a stream and more like a room you could sit in.

Between, Still is what I built in response.

It’s an independent photography journal, published at BetweenStill.com.

It works across three sections: Photo Essays that present cohesive bodies of photographic work with depth and intention; Conversations with photographers, publishers, and editors whose practice illuminates what it means to build something serious; and From the Archives, which recovers photographic work that time has largely set aside.

The inaugural issue went live today. It carries six pieces — essays by three photographers from India and the United States; an archival piece on a largely overlooked American photographer who built her practice entirely on her own terms; and two conversations with Mumbai-based practitioners: photographer and self-publisher Ritesh Uttamchandani on what it actually takes to make a photography book, and Kaamna Patel, founder of Editions JOJO — the independent publishing house and photography library that has become one of the most important spaces for photographic discourse in India — about building something meaningful without a template.

If you read this post because you’re interested in photography done seriously, Between, Still was made for you — BetweenStill.com

I’ll be sending a separate newsletter from the journal every two weeks, arriving with new pieces. You can follow directly from the site.

This newsletter — ChaloClickClick — continues as before.

Yours truly

Uday

Not in the writing of it — but in what came back. Twenty comments, and many more notes and messages that arrived quietly after. I had put something out that felt a little vulnerable, a little unsure of itself, and the response was generous in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

A few things stayed with me.

compared over-polished photography to fancy plated food — where every ingredient is measured rather than poured. “Pictures made with feeling,” he said, “just full of life.” I’ve been thinking about that ever since. The dal chawal your mother makes and the dal chawal in a restaurant can contain the exact same ingredients. One of them nourishes something the other cannot reach.

offered just one word for what he sees in much of contemporary photography online. Sterile. There it was — the whole argument, compressed.

And wrote about Daido Moriyama. About going against the grain, sometimes literally — shooting at 32,000 ISO, embracing the noise, the blur, the damage. I connected with that thread immediately. Daido doesn’t photograph the world. He collides with it. And the rawness that comes out of that collision is something you almost never see anymore.

It was who pointed me to the book, Wabi-Sabi: Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life by Beth Kempton. I ordered it shortly after. I am still reading it, still being shaped by it. But a few things have already landed.

“We give away freely that most precious of resources — our attention — and in doing so, we cheat ourselves out of the gifts that are already here.”

That sentence stopped me mid-page.

There is also a Japanese word the book introduces: Yugen. It refers to the depth of the world as seen with our imagination — the beauty of grace, of mystery, of realizing we are a small part of something much greater than ourselves. You cannot photograph Yugen directly. But sometimes, if you are quiet enough, it slips into a frame.

And this, which feels like a key: “Before we can beautify, we need to simplify.”

Not a technique. A way of seeing.

Where this began — Tokyo, at night

I want to go back to where this feeling started for me. Not in a workshop. Not in a conversation about philosophy. But on a street in Tokyo, at night, when the city was doing what Tokyo does — consuming itself in light and noise and extraordinary loneliness all at once.

I had my camera. I had no plan. I let the shutter drag.

By the end of the night, I had stopped thinking about camera settings and started thinking about feeling — and how time moves through a frame when you let it.

I came back from Tokyo feeling like something had shifted. Not dramatically. Quietly. Like when a door opens in a room you thought you knew completely.

Then came film

Slowing down is not a metaphor. When you shoot film, it is a physical fact. You have a small number of frames — 36, or 12. In my case I was shooting on a 6x6 medium format camera, so I had 12. You cannot reshoot endlessly and curate later. Each press of the shutter is a small commitment, a small act of faith.

I found that patience changed what I saw.

Then there are these two.

These were shot on film. And then something happened — the roll was accidentally exposed to light after shooting. The images were marked. Streaked. Some photographers would have grieved that. I found I couldn’t. The light that crept into the film found my father’s face, my father’s sister’s quiet upward glance, and left something on them. A trace. A ghost of the moment the film was vulnerable.

In Wabi-Sabi, there is the concept of kintsugi — the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold, making the fracture visible rather than hiding it. The break becomes part of the object’s history. Part of its beauty.

The light leak was my kintsugi. The blemish became the depth.

Now, try

I am not in a position to teach this. I am still learning it myself. But here is what I have been experimenting with, and what I would invite you to try.

Shoot without checking. Put the camera to your eye, press the shutter, and walk on. Don’t negotiate with the screen. Don’t review, reshoot, second-guess. Trust what you saw in the moment you saw it.

Slow everything down. A slower shutter speed. Fewer frames. One more breath before you lift the camera. See what blur reveals that sharpness insists on hiding.

Find one imperfect thing today and stay with it. A cracked wall. Fading paint. An old face. Don’t fix it. Don’t even frame it yet. Just be with it for a moment.

Make one photograph this week that you would never post. Only for yourself. Notice what happens to your eye when the audience disappears.

I have tried a few of these and trying more. The slow shutter brought me closer to the Tokyo feeling than anything I had done in a while. Things blurred. And in the blur, something felt more honest, and real.

A question before you go

Photography gave me a way to pay attention. Wabi-Sabi is teaching me what to pay attention to. These feel like the same practice, arrived at from different directions.

If you try any of these experiments — or if you have already been living some version of this without naming it — I would love to hear what happened. Even if nothing happened. Sometimes that is the most interesting answer.

And I’ll leave you with this, which I keep asking myself:

Is there a photograph you have made that felt true, even if it didn’t look perfect?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: Raghubir Singh — A family, Kamathipura, Bombay, 1977

I’m not interested in explaining this photograph or fixing its meaning. Instead, I want to stay with it—to look slowly at what’s present, what’s hinted at, and what the frame withholds. Like most photographs that endure, this one doesn’t offer answers easily. It asks for time.

I saw this photograph last Sunday at Jhaveri Contemporary in Mumbai, from the exhibition “Raghubir Singh: Bombay”. Of all the images in the show, this one stayed with me the longest.

What draws me in is how much life it holds without announcing itself. A resting body. A child being held. A woman standing in thought. Another turned away in the middle of work. Painted figures on the wall. Domestic life, exhaustion, tenderness, proximity all sharing the same frame.

It feels like a kind of Bombay I remember, or think I remember. Not just visually, but emotionally. A city of closeness. Of lives unfolding in public and private at once. A time that now feels distant.

What Raghubir Singh does so beautifully is make the everyday feel layered without making it dramatic. The colors, the gestures, the arrangement of bodies and walls everything seems ordinary at first. But the longer I look, the more the photograph opens up.

I’m not interested in fixing its meaning. Only in staying with it for a while.

Maybe that is what I responded to most: not just the scene itself, but the way it carries memory, intimacy, and the texture of a city that is always changing.

I’d be curious to know what you notice if you spend a little time with this photograph.
There’s no right reading—only what stays with you.

Everything looks pristine, smooth, perfectly graded, perfectly curated. And after a while, this is the part that surprises me —it all begins to look the same.

Not because the photographs are bad. Many are technically brilliant. But the sameness is hard to ignore: the same clean light, the same crisp clarity, the same gentle cinematic mood. The images don’t offend. They don’t risk much either. They slide past like polished stones.

Somewhere along the way, photographs started to look like they’ve been sanded down like the rough edges of life were treated as problems to fix.

And I realized something uncomfortable: I was doing it too.

The “plastic look” and what it does to a photograph

The internet rewards what is instantly readable: a clear subject, clean separation, controlled color, a frame that performs well at thumbnail size.

But life isn’t a thumbnail.

Life arrives with smudges. Shadows. Reflections. Motion. Half-seen gestures. A little confusion. A little weather.

And it isn’t only social media. It’s the whole pipeline. More and more, we’re all using the same tools: the same gear, the same software, the same presets, the same processing recipes. Even when the subjects are wildly different, the finish starts to converge.

At a certain point, the question quietly shifts from What did you see? to Will this fit the digital norms—clickable, trending, easy to like?

That’s where an artist’s voice can begin to fade.

Then there’s the newer layer: AI.

With AI-generated images and AI-assisted polishing. It is becoming harder to find anything that feels unmistakably human-made inside all the digital noise. Not because AI is bad, but because it raises the temperature of perfection even further. It makes flawlessness feel like the default.

So I’ve been spending less time on social media consuming photography. Not out of judgement, and not out of superiority—more like self-preservation. I want to protect my attention. My taste. My ability to be moved.

Because lately I’ve been craving the opposite:

• simplicity over spectacle

• presence over perfection

• photographs that look lived in, not manufactured

A word that helped: Wabi-Sabi

I’m not here to make Wabi-Sabi academic. I’m using it as a simple lens—a way to name what I’ve been longing for.

Wabi-Sabi points toward beauty in:

• impermanence (things change, fade, move)

• imperfection (the worn, the handmade, the human)

• incompleteness (what isn’t fully shown invites the viewer in)

It isn’t a style. It isn’t a preset. It isn’t a trend.

It’s a kind of permission.

And it changed what I started valuing in my own photographs.

The turning point: two frames, two versions of me

I made two frames of the same moment from a recent trip to Japan. An older man holding an eagle, another person recording him on a phone.

When I was still in “perfection mode,” I chose Photo A. It felt cleaner. More composed. More presentable.

But my Wabi-Sabi brain chooses Photo B.

Not because it’s technically better—if anything, it’s messier. But because the man smiles. And that smile is the photograph.

Photo A — my older choice

Photo B — my choice now

That smile is small, but it changes everything. It turns a demonstration into an exchange. It turns a subject into a person.

Wabi-Sabi didn’t give me a new style. It gave me a new question:
Is this frame trying to impress—or is it trying to evoke a feeling?

Why film is calling me again

This is also why I’ve been feeling pulled toward film again—not as nostalgia, not as a flex, and definitely not because film is “better.”

Film slows me down.

It makes me look longer. Wait longer. Commit more. Accept what the light gives me instead of polishing what I wish it was.

In a world where everything is editable, film feels less negotiable. And strangely, that feels freeing.

Presence over polish

I’m not declaring war on beautiful photographs. I still love craft. I still admire technique.

I’m just trying to return to something simpler: photographs that feel human again.

The imperfect frame isn’t a failure. Sometimes it’s the only honest thing in the room.

A small note for what comes next

In a couple of weeks, I’ll share a simple 7-day Wabi-Sabi assignment, something you can do with any camera. This will retrain the eye away from perfection and back toward presence.

Until then, I’m curious: have you ever rejected a photograph for being imperfect and later realized it was the truest frame you made?

In this first video post, I spend time with Summer of the Fawn by Alain Laboile — a book I return to often as I continue my own long-term family work.

This is not a review, but a quiet reflection on time, intimacy, and the generosity of a photographer’s gaze.

Turn the volume up slightly. Let the pages breathe.

In a previous post, I wrote about why photographs must stand on their own. This is one of those rare moments where the story outside the frame feels necessary to tell.

https://chaloclickclick.substack.com/p/what-i-had-to-unlearn-about-making

Back in the fall of 2009, I was in Mexico City to document daily life and to explore the city on foot, letting chance encounters guide my camera.

The first time I entered the Zócalo, the city’s main square. I came up from underground, emerging from the subway station straight into its vastness. I remember being immediately awestruck by the scale of the place and the cultural weight it carried. It was Sunday afternoon, the square was busy, and as is often the case in Mexico City, there was a public demonstration underway.

The Zócalo is framed by power and history, the cathedral on one side, the presidential palace on the other. It is one of the largest city squares in the world, and yet it isn’t conventionally beautiful.

I’m drawn to rallies and protests because of the raw energy they contain. There is emotion on the surface; anger, fear, resolve, hope and very little artifice. As I noticed a large crowd moving toward the presidential palace, I instinctively walked toward it, camera in hand.

These were factory workers protesting the government’s decision to shut down an electrical plant—an action that affected somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand people. The group marching toward the palace numbered in the thousands.

At the time, I was young, curious, and more than a little naïve. I didn’t think too much about consequences. I worked my way into the center of the protest and began photographing faces, placards, and gestures—trying to stay alert to the emotion spilling into the street.

At some point, a few protesters began pointing at me and moving closer. I was in that familiar photographer’s state—focused, reactive, slightly detached—and didn’t immediately register what was happening. Suddenly, I found myself lifted off the ground and tossed into the air.

For a brief moment, everything stopped.

They caught me before I hit the ground. I stood there stunned, trying to understand what had just happened. Using a mix of English, broken Spanish, and hand gestures, I explained that I was only there to document their protest, nothing more.

They burst out laughing.

They told me they were just having fun and meant no harm. The tension dissolved as quickly as it had formed. We shared a moment of laughter, and then the protest carried on.

It was an experience I will never forget.

Looking back now, the photographs carry none of that chaos, fear, or misplaced courage. And that is exactly the point. The images do not explain what went into making them. They don’t hint at how close I came to losing control of the situation. They simply exist as fragments of a larger moment in time.

The story behind the photograph is real, vivid, and meaningful to me. But it lives outside the frame. The photographs must do their own work—quietly, without leaning on the adventure that surrounded their making.

That distinction matters to me now more than ever.

Reading Photographs — Monthly Series
One image. Close looking. Open questions.
This month: David Alan Harvey — Rio de Janeiro, Ipanema beach, 2014

This month, I look at a photograph by David Alan Harvey—a very different photographer, and from a different generation, than last month’s choice. I’ve always associated David’s work with strong contrast and colors that push themselves forward. In his images, color and contrast aren’t just aesthetic choices; they shape the emotional tone, almost acting as a central character within the frame.

This photograph from Rio is driven by feeling. A beach often suggests freedom, play, escape, and independence, and this image holds all of that at once. The mood is amplified by the fading light of sunset, where silhouettes replace detail and gesture becomes more important than identity.

What stands out is how much the image contains without feeling crowded—the sea, the beach, the mountains, and human activity all coexist. Despite this complexity, the photograph remains light, energetic, and alive. It feels spontaneous and fearless, much like the moment itself.

There’s no single moment here to hold onto. The photograph doesn’t ask to be dissected or explained. It simply invites you to stand there for a while, in that light, and experience the feeling before it fades.

I’d be curious to know what you notice if you spend a little time with this photograph.
There’s no right reading—only what stays with you.

But sometimes, the act of making the photograph begins to overshadow the photograph itself.

This often happens when an image is difficult to make—because of access, timing, permission, physical effort, or emotional investment. The more complicated the process, the easier it is for that struggle to become central in our minds. We start valuing the photograph not only for what it shows, but for what it cost us to make it.

The problem is that the viewer was not there.

When a photograph is shown to an audience, they do not know the obstacles behind it. They do not know how long you waited, how many doors you knocked on, how uncomfortable or risky or exhausting the situation was. They see the image for what it is—nothing more, nothing less—and respond only to what it gives them emotionally, if it gives them anything at all.

This is a trap many photographers fall into early on. I certainly did. I remember feeling the need to explain my photographs, to narrate the effort behind them, almost as if I had to justify their existence. I would tell the story around the image so the viewer could understand why it mattered.

But a photograph should not need defending.

If an image cannot stand on its own—if it relies on an explanation of how hard it was to make—then the problem is not with the audience. The problem is with the photograph. The job of the photographer is not to describe the difficulty of the process, but to translate what they felt when they encountered the scene into a visual language that others can feel too.

Nobody really cares how difficult it was to make the image. And no one should.

That does not mean the work behind the photograph is unimportant. On the contrary, logistics are a fundamental part of photography, especially documentary work. Gaining access, building trust, talking to sources, navigating locations, and working under challenging circumstances are all part of the craft. A documentary photographer is expected to do this work quietly and responsibly. It is assumed, not showcased.

The photograph is the outcome—not the effort.

There may be a wonderful backstory behind an image, and sometimes that story is worth telling. But it is a separate story. When it begins to cloud the reading of the image or take over its meaning, it weakens the photograph rather than strengthening it.

One way to deal with our own emotional attachment to images we’ve made is to create distance from them. Put the work away. Don’t look at it for a few months. Let your memory of the effort fade. When you return to the image later, you are more likely to see it the way a stranger would—with clearer, more critical eyes.

This does not mean that time will magically make a photograph better. It won’t. What it does is remove the emotional noise surrounding the act of making it. It allows you to ask a simpler, more honest question: Does this image stand on its own?

Separating emotion from the image does not mean becoming detached or indifferent. It means trusting the photograph to do its job—without explanation, without apology, and without the need to carry the weight of our personal struggle.

When an image truly works, it speaks quietly and directly. Everything else fades into the background.

Over the past months, I’ve been shaping the idea of a small, print-first publication devoted to street and documentary photography — work that values patience, context, and long attention over speed or spectacle. Rather than announcing something fully formed, I wanted to begin here, by asking a few questions and making space for perspectives from those who already care about photographs and the stories they carry.

There is no obligation to answer everything, or anything at all. These questions are less about validation and more about orientation — helping me understand what kind of attention, care, and curiosity might already exist around this idea. Whatever emerges will be shaped slowly and deliberately, with respect for the time and trust offered here.

A short form with the questions is linked below:

https://forms.gle/iCweoL7sMhnhHxYU7

This post is part of a collaborative Reading Photographs exercise—an exchange where two photographers share one image each and offer a quiet reading of the other’s photograph. Not a critique in the conventional sense, but a way of seeing: staying with what the image reveals, what it withholds, and the questions it opens up.

Sreeranj and I have worked together through workshops , most recently during the Bharani and Theyyam workshops in Kerala. Many of my own instincts around patience, ambiguity, and letting photographs breathe have been shaped through those conversations in the field.

What follows is a simple exchange of looking.

Sreeranj Sreedhar reads my photograph

“There are many things that I love about this image. The stretched hand touching the feet is the main story here. Then comes the colors very balanced to the viewers eyes making the subject stand out in the yellow and the green is there to support it. It is also nicely echoed at the background which makes it a surprise.

The layers add to the depth of field taking us inside the frame. The guy at the right looking at the lady, makes it a perfect moment and a pointer for us guiding to look towards the center. The poster on the left adds to the story which I am not clear what it is ..is it about a missing lady and could this lady in yellow be that one in the photo, is she taking blessings from her guru to renounce the world ? All these questions arise.

Overall very poignant image, making me stay on it for long time and create my own narrative of it.”

I read Sreeranj’s photograph

“This photograph feels like a quiet act of watching.

Two boys sit at the edge of a stage, holding onto a rope, peering into a world just beyond their reach. Their presence pulls me in—not as observers with access, but as participants held at a distance. The rope feels less like a prop and more like a line of connection, loosely tying them to what unfolds in front of them.

Beyond them, dancers move in red and white, partially hidden by the curtain. We don’t quite see the performance, and that feels intentional. The image isn’t about the event itself, but about the act of looking—about curiosity, anticipation, and the space between what is visible and what remains just out of frame.

The photograph stays with me because it doesn’t insist. It allows mystery to remain intact.”

A shared pause

There’s no attempt here to arrive at meaning.

Just two photographs, two readings, and the space between them—left open for the reader to inhabit in their own way.