For Oprah Daily
“If a daughter were looking for a place to explore the joys and complexities of her relationship with her 79-year-old father, Varanasi, the holy city in northern India, would not be a bad spot to land. After all, it’s said that the Buddha gave his first post-enlightenment sermon just a few miles outside of town. And if that father happened to be Raghu Rai, the single-most revered photographer in India’s history, and that daughter was 29-year-old Avani Rai, herself an emerging photographer, filmmaker, and artist, then Varanasi’s mystical setting—dark-eyed sadhus cloaked in saffron robes sit on the banks of the Ganges, thousands of tiny altars splashed with flower petals dot the side streets—would offer plenty of moments to light up their cameras.”
from Varanasi
Afar Magazine
“Moment by moment, this city will teach me to stay awake to the present, to pay attention, to follow the thread of human connection, to take pleasure where it’s found.”
In Bloom
An expression of love needs no language. In bloom, each scent, each petal, each hue brings about a different feeling. In traditions and ceremonies, between lovers and others.
Bombay — An Odyssey
Women of Punjab : Gurdaspur
When we photograph, we capture the moment in time - the evidence of its occurrence.
Through photography I capture the way I see and experience the world. The world through my eye revealed me to myself . When I am the witness of something or a moment (if I haven’t recorded it) it is as though I never experienced it at all or that it never happened at all.
I have been photographing Punjab for three years now, my ancestral home. The entire landscape and its people now occur to me as my ‘home’. I have grown up experiencing the land and its people as I visited my grandmother’s home over the last 3 decades. Due to my lived and relived experiences of the same land through the year, my images capture the vibration of my past through my present-day experiences. As I continue to revisit I become the witness of the layered narratives of the land and the photographs thus become the palimpsest of the chronicles of history of a people.
When I first began shooting in Punjab, I felt like an outsider. But through incessant image-making, I no longer feel like that. Each picture provides a sense of familiarity and a sense of belongingness as I was able to keep my memories of the place. Documenting the same place but with a deeper connection offered a very different feeling. With this renewed sense of belonging, I started listening to the language of nature, the eyes of the people and what they say when no words are exchanged. If there was no spoken language, this is what home is for me .
A home, a community that echoes the voices of people across generations , weaving the narrative of the of Punjab. These images no longer act as an objective point of view but negotiate the space between the objective and the subjective.
Mix Media
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