This piece is my favorite one in the Aksa Collection. It currently hangs above my desk and looms large on my website and business cards. I suppose I like it, first and foremost, as a beautiful picture. I dig the colors of the figures and the fact that somehow, through the process of ICM, the subject lost a leg when in reality, there were two. And the two-legged figure in the foreground seems to be supporting the one-legged one as they gaze off into the background where a lone figure faces the sea. In my first interpretation of this piece, the distant dream was of the one-legged figure who wished it was free to move about and enjoy the sun and sea like the figure out near the water. Naturally, bipedal mobility would never be a reality and hence the title.

HYDRATE will be available for sale at the March 18 launch at Drifters Cafe & Bar in Bandra. Join me there at 12 pm for fantastic beer (I dig their IPA) and food. And support my launch by taking home a limited edition print!

Bottled water is everywhere you look. If you need a drink and you’re away from home, chances are a plastic bottle of water is moments away. But studies and research continue to shed light on one of the biggest scams in consumer history, one that reaches back as far as the 1767 in Boston, when Jackson’s Spa water was sold as commercially-distributed therapeutic water, it’s becoming more clear that bottled water, especially plastic-based bottled water, is at best, not much better than tap water, and at worst, harmful personally.

I picked up my first camera when I was a child in the 70s. It was one of those rectangular wonders that you could buy at the supermarket check-out lines. Don’t forget the pack of flash bulbs and film! Naturally, in those days, I didn’t know anything about photography and to be fair, those dime store cameras weren’t meant for those who did. Point, shoot, and pop! If everything worked out, you’d have a strobey-looking indoor shot of your favorite family member or pet. The picture quality would have been terrible but that wasn’t a problem. It was rewarding enough to obtain a few keepers whenever it was time to pick up your prints in one of those envelopes.

If there’s anyone one thing that can be agreed on by most art aficionados, it’s this: art sure is subjective. That applies to what’s considered “art” right down to whether that art is “good” or something else entirely. All of us could probably name a well-known artist’s work that we absolutely love and respect and art from someone else who we think is shit. Have you ever had a conversation that went something like this: “…we walked into a gallery and everything in there was trash. A kid could have done it. I could have done it.”

The process of Intentional Camera Movement (ICM) can be daunting when it comes to the ratio of good to bad images. For the Aksa Collection, I made two excursions to Aksa Beach in Mumbai in 2022. In each session, I took around 2,000 photos of people along the crowded shoreline. Of those thousands of photos, the culling process is arduous to say the least. That’s because the practice of ICM is about as imperfect of an art form than any in existence.

False Profit is a personal piece that I don't mind talking about at the expense of ruining someone's own interpretation of it. Well, sometimes that's just the way it goes. I don't mind going out on a limb if it's my own limb. With the exception maybe of another image in the Aksa Collection that's a deep devilish red, this piece is the only one that's dark and runs the risk of not really fitting in. But it was originally created from the same set of images at Aksa Beach - I only found a darker interpretation of it as I began to strip out the color. For me, this could be the backside of a dystopian US One Dollar Bill. The front side would probably just be of the vacuous and ironic motto that's been attached to American paper currency since 1957: In God We Trust.

I'm essentially a self-taught photographer who fell in love with street photography after living in India. I didn't know that street photography was a thing when I studied biomedical photography back in the film days, a career that never took off because of the sheer soul-killing aspect of it. At the time, I thought I could only make money as a photographer if I photographed models and fashion, subjects I had only a slight passion for and absolutely no background in. Such was my ignorance of photography. So when I'm asked these days which photographers I'm inspired by, I have no answer because I began shooting street photography without references. I was my only guide. Later, I studied photography more carefully and I can throw out names at you of photographers I like -- but none of them have informed my photography in the slightest. If I were to namedrop from the art world, there are only two that stood out for me in my early days: Egon Schiele and Marc Chagall. But this story is for another day.

DANCE FOR THE DEAD will be available for sale at the March 20 launch at Drifters Cafe & Bar in Bandra. Join me there at 12 pm for fantastic beer (I dig their IPA) and food. And support my launch by taking home a limited edition print!