All images from Desi Boys © Soham Gupta

Soham Gupta made his name capturing Kolkata’s unseen poor. Now his mood has softened, and the city’s youth movement has picked up pace

In Kolkata, young men crowd on roadsides, around food stalls, in shops, warehouses and arcades. From the tomb of Wajid Ali Shah – the last Nawab of the northern region of Awadh – in Metiabruz, to the bustle of Park Street and Mullick Bazar, men linger on motorbikes, smoke, laugh and flirt nervelessly, the same as youngsters the world over. One of them, Sahid, looks especially gleeful, his shirt removed to reveal a toned torso and a forearm tattoo sleeve (the word ‘Love’ is just visible). A woman places her ringed fingers on his bare chest, their easy smiles matching. Her eyes are relaxed, looking directly into the camera, while Sahid peers over his muscular right shoulder. His body, her face, are almost luminous against the night sky and worn paintwork of the thick railings behind them.

Sahid is an amateur bodybuilder, we learn from Soham Gupta’s Desi Boys journals. He has just started working in his father’s motorcycle garage in Tollygunge in south Kolkata, but often hangs out at the Safari Park in nearby Rabindra Sarobar – one of countless public areas or monuments named after Rabindranath Tagore in the city. “The girls are always dying to pose with me – and it always gives me a high,” Sahid says. After he has posed for Gupta, Sahid takes him to meet some of his friends nearby, boasting to them that he has just had his picture taken. “The others wanted to have their images made and I was suddenly engulfed in requests, from all sides,” Gupta writes. “And happily, I kept making images.”

These are the Desi Boys – Gupta’s friends, inspiration, subjects. They come from across this city of nearly 15 million, a swelling youth movement comprising both Muslims and Hindus belonging to a range of caste positions, including some Dalits. The idea for the project came about after Gupta was shooting a fashion editorial for New Delhi-based magazine Platform, where he was commissioned by Bharat Sikka. He began noticing what had previously blended into the background. Not just young men wearing fake designer clothing and dyeing their hair, but the way these sartorial choices constituted a new form of expression – the audacity with which they showed off, exchanged ideas, circulated pictures of each other, and saw their choices as distinctly subcultural. “There are different hints of masculinity in different places,” Gupta tells me. “They’re playing many different roles.”

Music is a key part of this new collective identity. Pune-born rapper MC Stan is an important touchpoint for these groups, Gupta says, with his lyrics describing life in – and beyond – India’s working and lower-class communities. The song Basti Ka Hasti is especially popular, its lyrics a combination of tribal hip-hop bravado and pride in a disadvantaged upbringing: “I’m a celebrity in the township!” he barks at one point. “MC Stan is very explicitly talking about the economic divide in India; he is the ultimate symbol for the Great Indian Dream,” Gupta explains. Another rapper crops up in Gupta’s journals, an amateur called MC Cidnapper. “He was not older than 20 – with a lock of golden hair up to his shoulder,” Gupta writes. The boy bounds over to him, excited that he might have his photograph taken and reciting a few lines from a new song about a girl who left him for a richer man.

New India

Desi Boys depicts a globalised India, but not in the way one might associate with tech-hubs, Silicon Valley CEOs and the country’s recent lunar landing, which prime minister Narendra Modi described as “mirror[ing] the aspirations and capabilities of 1.4 billion Indians”. Instead, the globalisation the Desi Boys experience relates mostly to liberalisation, social connectivity and employment – all of which have come about via mass mobile phone uptake in the past decade. In supremely competitive higher education and job markets, the arrival of the gig economy has offered new routes out of unemployment. The criss-crossing journeys these jobs involve add to Desi Boys’ sense of motion – of restlessness in a hyperactive city, of youthful excitement matched by its surroundings. “For many bourgeois and upper-class families, these boys are looked upon as a menace,” Gupta says. That, more than anything else, surely boosts their subcultural credentials.

Desi Boys was made in a specific Indian – and Kolkatan – context. Despite the fake Gucci clothes and Levi’s T-shirts, it is a simplification to assume that globalisation means simply emulating the west. There are other motifs alongside the preference for South Asian hip-hop. Several of Gupta’s encounters happen while searching for the next bowl of steaming biryani, while buildings’ pastel walls, DIY advertising boards and the boys’ sandals and coiffed hairstyles are distinctly Indian. The flash illuminates sections of the graffitied walls behind each of Gupta’s subjects. Exposed pipes and security grills speak to the thousands of vendors who line Kolkata’s daily markets. The youngsters smoke and flex their muscles, gestures whose universality as expressions of young masculinity give them an endearing edge. It is clear that there is a deep affection between artist and subject. “We are like brothers,” Gupta reflects.

The role of religion

But more than any visual cues, it is India’s tense political and religious climate that gives Desi Boys its texture. Led by Modi since 2014, the country’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has proposed a series of legislation which disadvantages India’s Muslim population. Passed in 2019, the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) excluded Muslims from a fast-track for persecuted minorities to attain citizenship, while an accompanying amendment to the National Register of Citizens (NRC) similarly planned to exclude Muslims from an accelerated naturalisation process. Following widespread protests in early 2020, the NRC has yet to be implemented nationwide, with West Bengal among several states not under BJP control saying it will not enact the rulings. Cities with historically Muslim names have been renamed to reflect the BJP’s Hindutva ideology – Allahabad has become Prayagraj; Osmanabad is now officially Dharashiv, for example – and mob intimidation and violence against Muslims has become increasingly normalised.

The Desi Boys belong to both religions, and Kolkata’s political history plays an important part in the social harmony of the project. West Bengal was led by the communist Left Front from 1977 until 2011. “There’s no room for xenophobia in West Bengal – we grew up among too many hammers and sickles,” Gupta says. He recalls a discussion with a young man after he commented on his celebratory dress: “Eid is for the Muslims, but at the same time Eid is for everyone.” Gupta connects this environment to the willingness of the Desi Boys to express themselves, especially with styles that subvert a traditionally conservative culture. “Here, people feel safe to assert themselves, to go out in clothes that they like, to dye their hair. Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through,” he says.

Gupta describes Desi Boys’ subjects as “all subaltern in some way”. He draws a link with his 2017 project Angst, in which he made pictures of those at the foot of Kolkata’s social and caste ladders – the homeless and the hopeless. The word ‘subaltern’ resonates deeply in Kolkata, particularly in its adoption by late-20th-century postcolonial theory. Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee and Gayatri Spivak, founding members of the Subaltern Studies group, all attended Kolkata’s Presidency College (the latter two were also born in the city) before developing their ideas abroad. The group applied Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the subaltern to the marginalised populations whose experiences had been omitted from the history of India, especially narratives of how anti-imperial thought had developed into the independence movement. The subaltern is not simply someone who is poor, neglected or part of a system-based underclass. It means that they are excluded from the economic, social and cultural institutions of power within their colonial society, and – as Spivak queries – may also lack the means to articulate their condition if the language and norms of the coloniser have been impressed upon them.

“Desi Boys is a response against the xenophobic phase we’re going through”

Subaltern experiences

How does the subaltern relate to Gupta’s subjects – and his wider project? On the one hand, his photographs are the voice of subaltern experience. The way Gupta makes pictures is collaborative, but not prescriptive. The boys ask for their portraits for their WhatsApp pictures: “Come, take a group photo – of all of us! And you better send them to us! Not just one or two, but the entire set!” they tell him. His portraits perhaps circulate among his subjects more than they do in a western context, in which exploitative power dynamics risk being repeated. The image is networked, not static.

But still there is wariness around the ethics of display, particularly with Angst – the portraits at times shocking, raw and near-theatrical in their depiction of alterity and deprivation. The series was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale, the epitome of western art-world polish. But, as shown by the displacement of street vendors before the recent G20 Summit in New Delhi, the Indian establishment often chooses to look away from its own working classes. In this context, looking at people is recognising that they exist, even if it risks showing them as object not subject. To share images today is to engage with a specific moment in Indian history, to show integration, joy and modernity when openness seems on the wane. It is history without the responsibility of history; a record without the dryness of documentary.

When Gupta first titled Desi Boys, he was cautioned by critics whose advice he paraphrases in the Desi Boys journals. “How can you name it Desi Boys! You’re further marginalising the subaltern by calling this work that!” But Gupta’s photographs can be seen as a subaltern source – as history from below, with photography a new discourse. “Angst was made at a time when I was really emotionally down. It had all my anger in the work for a world that doesn’t care for people who are marginalised,” Gupta says. Desi Boys reflects a mood shift, but a way to invite his subjects into the image-making contract. “I’m more balanced now and it shows in the pictures,” Gupta continues. “They’re a celebration of life – my version of the truth that I am trying to portray.”

“In all the places I’ve lived, I’ve been involved and embedded in the community. But when I speak, I’ve never made an effort to have a softer accent; I’m a foreigner, and that’s what differentiates me”

AS: Which photographers were you specifically drawing inspiration from?

SB: Martin Parr, Paul Reas, Anna Fox, Paul Graham, and so on. I was using the same set-up as them, shooting in colour using a wide-angle lens and flash. It was kind of a visual experiment to understand how I saw things and respond to places, in an attempt to find a way of working that suited me, and how I might own that aesthetic. The flash gives you the opportunity to see the world differently, and to transform the most ordinary things into something exceptional. I was also discovering the work of Weegee and Diane Arbus, and then realised that I wanted to make photographs in black-and-white.

AS: Was your cinematic background also informing your work?

SB: I think that was more in terms of creating a sense of narrative, and learning how to direct the people that I was photographing – asking them to pose in a certain way, or to be as expressionless as possible, which I think I got from the films of Aki Kaurismäki or Robert Bresson. I wanted the kinds of expressions that make everything neutral and ambiguous, from which a certain tension can arise. There’s a lot of humour in that as well, but a humour that’s found in the ordinary. I didn’t want to give the viewer any certainties, but instead to see what the photographs did to them.

AS: Your new book, Ta-ra, draws from a decade’s worth of work made in Wales, from 2013 to 2023, so some of the photographs included were made during this very early period.

SB: Yes, the earliest pictures in Ta-ra are from that time, when I was still at uni trying to discover myself and my approach to photography. There’s a portrait in the book of a man with a dishevelled pompadour – that’s at the Porthcawl Elvis Festival. I took that picture in black-and-white, and was like, “Wow, this is where I want to take my work”.

AS: Earlier you mentioned Weegee and Diane Arbus. Nancy Newhall once referred to Weegee’s photographs as “extraordinary psychological documents”, and John Szarkowski described Arbus’ pictures as being “concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence”. In Ta-ra, were you also more interested in exploring and emphasising the ‘psychological’ possibilities of photography, rather than the ‘social realities’?

SB: Well, that partially comes from the use of flash, but it also comes from always seeing a place with a degree of detachment, as a foreigner or otherwise. In all the places I’ve lived, I’ve been involved and embedded in the community. But when I speak, I’ve never made an effort to have a softer accent; I’m a foreigner, and that’s what differentiates me. I can have a familiarity with a place and its people, and at the same time always have a degree of detachment, because I don’t feel the need to hide my cultural background or references. It’s not about adapting to a place, it’s about using my own perspective to incorporate the elements of the place where I’ve chosen to live – what I like and dislike – into my own vision of it, and being able to be both affectionate and critical at the same time. Again, there’s an ambiguity there, in that you have both sides.

AS: What do you find particularly unique about Wales, and what are you specifically trying to express about the people and the place in Ta-ra?

SB: If you look at Chris Killip’s In Flagrante, at the people in those pictures, everything has been taken away from them, in front of their eyes, and you see their sense of desperation. They’re not letting things slip away from them – someone is coming and taking everything away, and they can’t do anything about it. Alternatively, in my images, I think a sense of numbness prevails. It’s like there’s nothing left to be taken away. With everything that’s happened in Wales and the UK – even since 2013, with the implementation of the austerity policies, and then Brexit and its consequences, and then the pandemic, and then the current economic crisis – what remains is this profound sense of numbness.

AS: Do you feel that this ‘numbness’ is a kind of psychological response or emotional defence mechanism, which is particularly prevalent here as the result of these repeated traumas?

SB: Yes. Also, when I was making the work, I myself was also going in and out of that same sensation of numbness. Even though these pictures were made specifically in Wales, I think this is something that is happening throughout the whole country, in working-class communities and elsewhere.

You’ve also moved to the UK from another country, in your case from the United States, so you must also see the social divisions that are here, and recognise how the class structure is always present, and so systematically embedded within this society. To me, this is unbearable; I can’t stand it. I try to treat everyone on the same level and with the same respect. I don’t make any differentiations if I speak with a lord or a person on the street, I treat them the same, and that’s how I expect to be treated. It’s just common sense. So I find the levels of injustice and inequality that exist here unbearable.

Of course, I don’t come from a perfect land. I come from a place where there is extreme polarisation – 40 per cent of the population of Argentina is now living in poverty. But when you think about the UK, and all of the policies that were implemented in the 1980s by Thatcher and the neo-liberal movement, you realise that they may have actually won by successfully destroying the sense of community in a lot of places. And that’s why there’s not just a numbness, but also a sense of profound solitude within this work.

AS: So Ta-ra is definitely more of a ‘psychological’ rather than a ’social’ document?

SB: I’m not trying to redefine the place itself, or impose my ideas onto these people – it is what it is – but these were the things that were driving me when I was making this work. As photographers we have to accept that our medium is subjective, that within our work there’s always the influence of who we are, how we feel, our cultural background, and everything else we bring to a place. I don’t actually know how much of my own psyche or psychological state is in there, but that happens all the time with photography – there’s always a degree to which we impose ourselves onto the people, places and things we photograph. We are working with the real, but in a way we are also borrowing these things for our own agenda. That’s why it took me so long to come to terms with this work, and to realise that the ideas behind it were actually very simple – that it’s about how I was discovering and responding to a place at the same time.

“This project has probably been the most difficult for me to edit – it took me a long time to realise that I was responding to the place emotionally, and that there was no need to over-conceptualise it beyond that”

AS: In ethical terms, how do you deal with this issue? How do you explain to the people you’re photographing that your own perspective or agenda will inevitably play a role in how they will be portrayed?

SB: Of course, it’s very difficult to explain all the intricacies of this to someone in a few minutes – and in this work in particular, many of my interactions with people were ephemeral encounters. I may have met them once and never encountered them again. But I always give people my contact details. For example, there’s one picture that I really love, of two girls – one of them is about 10 years old, and the other maybe 14. It’s one of my favourite pictures, but before doing anything with it, I got the contact details of their father, and I wrote him an email, and then another, and then another. I sent him the picture and said, “This is one the best pictures that I’ve ever made, and it would be great if you could give me a call or send me your number. I would love to talk with you, and give you a print.” And nothing – he never got in touch. If someone does get in touch I get back to them; if they want a print, I give it to them.

AS: During the making of this work, how did you decide where to photograph? What specifically were you looking for?

SB: This project came about because I was just shooting all the time, for the pleasure and sake of making pictures. I think it’s important to understand the place where you are. Like any photographer, I could be parachuted into a faraway place and find things that interest me, but I’m not driven by exoticism. I much prefer to be in the most ‘boring’ or familiar places, creatively that’s where I find a challenge. Trying to elevate something that is seemingly insignificant, and trying to identify remarkable things within the ordinary is a great challenge.

So really, it just depended on where I was, and what I was doing. Ta-ra is almost entirely made in the south of Wales, predominantly in towns and cities, rather than in rural places or the bucolic countryside. I really wasn’t trying to target a particular demographic, or certain class or anything. I was just looking for people who I was drawn to. But what I was always trying to do was to decontextualise everything, so that the context for each picture would be informed by the other photographs, the edit, and the sequence, in order to create an almost imaginary sort of space. This project has probably been the most difficult for me to edit – it took me a long time to realise that I was responding to the place emotionally, and that there was no need to over-conceptualise it beyond that. I started with 250 prints, and then slowly tried to make sense of it, refine it, and find the common factors that brought everything together. That way, the work itself collectively builds a place of its own.

AS: What do you think your Argentinian perspective brings to this place that might differ from that of British photographers?

SB: I always feel like I’m some kind of hybrid, because the education I received and so much of the information that I consumed came from the UK. But then I have this set of cultural references that comes from Latin America and Europe. So there is something different there, but I don’t know exactly what it is. Sometimes I feel – maybe you notice it too – that in the UK there is a certain lack of spontaneity within life in general. You have to constantly generate new adventures for yourself if you want to be challenged by what’s happening around you. When I was beginning to make this work, I felt this need to ‘feel alive’, so I went to what was supposed to be the most ‘notorious’ neighbourhood in Newport. And indeed there were people on the streets all the time, and things were spontaneously happening everywhere, and it was great – and, as in Argentina, there was a strong sense of community. When I was walking around, some kids came up to me, wanting me to take their picture, so I took it, and then immediately said, “Let’s go talk to your parents now.” So I went to talk to the parents, and they ended up inviting me into their houses. I made lots of pictures with these two families – in fact, that’s where I made the portrait of the baby who’s all wrapped up.

AS: You spent 10 years making this work. How did you know when the project was complete?

SB: Because I didn’t want to make any more pictures. Maybe I didn’t exhaust all the possibilities, but I felt like it was time to move on. As I said before, the reasons I ended up in Wales, and staying for so long, were chance and entirely circumstantial. It wasn’t something I’d planned, it was just the way my life organically happened. And I’ve reached a point now where I don’t want to make any more work here, but in a nice way; maybe that’s why the book is called Ta-ra, which is a local expression that is commonly used to say a friendly goodbye.

When you become part of a place, you learn to both love it and hate it, but over time more and more things have made it harder for me to live in the UK, and I don’t want to become any more cynical and angry – then it’s really not fair on the people I’m photographing. So I guess that I don’t want to make any more work here because I don’t feel the same way that I once did, and the project might become too dark, or turn into something that it wasn’t intended to be.

AS: Despite this, do you still feel an affection for or connection to Wales, having spent so long living and working there?

SB: Of course, all of my adult life happened here. It’s home – it’s so familiar to me now, it’s what I know, and it’s easy for me to make work here. The people have given me so much. To be honest, I’ve always been fighting with myself here, because I never wanted to make work specifically about Wales, and still I ended up doing it – twice in fact, considering that I also just published another book, The Dynamic, which is about a local Welsh newspaper.

I really do love the history here as well, especially considering that many of the biggest achievements of the UK’s working class started in Wales. The National Health Service was modelled on the Tredegar Workmen’s Medical Aid Society, which was set up by Welsh miners in the 19th century. Before that, you had the Chartist movement in the 1830s, and then you also have a lot of people who went to fight against Franco and fascism during the Spanish Civil War, then you have the Miners’ Strike [1984–85]. In certain communities there is still this strong sense of socialism, which people are born with. It’s by no means a socialist utopia, but those kinds of values are embedded within the culture and remain in the people. Even if they may have lost the battle, there is a sense of solidarity, openness and welcoming energy; it’s still here. So I will always love it, but I have to say ta-ra.

I’ve had a deep interest in photobooks since 2006, when I made my first one at university. I was very aware that this was a big part of how I could disseminate my work. I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. That monetary side of things has influenced my path to evolve the format. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be. Things have to evolve; all art evolves. I had to find some way to make them mine – to imbue them with unique authorship.

I started making my ‘book installations’ in 2013. They were very limited, primitive and unrefined. Since then I’ve been trying to use a more sculptural form. I come from a construction background, and I physicalise the work at a very early stage. Even after the first shoot I might make an initial dummy to bring the images off the screen. My book installations are, in effect, maquettes. As I complete each one, I view them in the same way I would dummies. These dummies – that from traditional interpretation would be deemed the ‘back end’ of a photo project – are the heart and soul of it.

The Abysm is a book of pictures of my father connected to his cancer diagnosis. It depicts a complete mental collapse and breakdown. Those are honourable and truthful depictions. I felt that the single-form photobook couldn’t adequately represent that. I needed to add other dimensions. The idea with the project is to show the images in a complete snowscape – to show the book installation in a cold, algid environment. That is how the experience felt and how it was. I hope that feeding that exterior environment into the narrative of the book will add an element of connection for the viewer. I’m trying to bring the imagery off the page while still keeping the page.

Caligo started as a vertical installation – playing with the dummies and thinking, ‘How could this work?’ It first came from a cardboard form, then there was the idea of a concertina book. I thought, ‘What if the concertina book somehow came off a wall?’ I tested it in Paris – the first proper maquette – and when I submitted it to the Aesthetica Art Prize, they asked whether it could be made horizontal. I didn’t know how to take being asked to change the artwork to fit the space, but I thought it was a good challenge so I made the horizontal version. Another form of Caligo is the fourmetre installation, which challenges the very definition of what a photobook can be.

“I couldn’t – and still can’t – afford to make a traditional commercial photobook. I started to question why there is this limited definition of what the photobook can be.”

For Interstates of Becoming, I spent four years working in the Indian Himalayas. I travelled along NH5, a road along the border with Tibet, which is one of the most dangerous roads in India. It was terrifying. It was originally a trunk road built by the British to syphon trade away from Kashmir. Today it’s a very important route for the hydroelectric industry and for the Indian military, because it services the border region with China. The mountain is continually eroding, with landslides every other day. There is also the creation of man-made concrete structures to try to counter this. It’s a continuing cycle of construction and destruction. I am currently creating a photobook installation that depicts the direct and indirect effects humans and mountains have on each other. When the series was shown as NH5, I included a wall that was leaning against the viewer like a landslide – a billboard you would walk under. I wanted to bring across all the elements I experienced on this road to the installation.

As global temperatures rise, glaciers melt and water flows increase. Excess water creates more precipitation that, in turn, falls heavily within the Himalayas. Concrete, metal and tarmac act as the facade of human preservation. The peril is amplified by the ‘developed world’’s ignorance to the effects of imperial and capitalist industrialisation, but human endeavour doesn’t stop. It’s an ongoing contest for survival that binds humans with the mountains. I like to think there’s a harmony within this tussle for dominance; that’s what I’m trying to depict in these photographs.

It’s liberating to remove the ‘documentary photography’ title. I always felt that was too limiting. The fallacy of truth that is connected to it restricted me. Being so immersed in documentary photography as my starting form, I later considered whether I could use different materials to show the truth I’m trying to convey. To show the strength of what I’m trying to convey. The narrative is honest.

I started writing my theories, which I call An Architecture of Disappearance. This is a body of work in many manifestations. My work is rooted in the language of architecture, because it’s the only language I really know. My medium still isn’t photography, though I’ve worked with many photographers. Part of campaigning for Shahidul was to engage the arts community. That’s when I first began to be connected with his international photography network. They were amazing, holding protests for Shahidul in Mexico, then Peru, India and Argentina.

One hundred and seven days later, he was released. By then I was an activist (though I find it a clumsy term). I was working with South Asia Solidarity Group, a UK-based anti-imperialist, anti-racist activist group, when the Shaheen Bagh protests broke out in India. While Shahidul had been in jail, I’d run a Free Shahidul installation at the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, where we showed his Crossfire photos of extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh. That had happened spontaneously, thanks to the artist Tania Bruguera.

When the Shaheen Bagh protests broke out [in 2019], I thought, ‘Let’s try and do something in the Turbine Hall again’. We need to use these spaces in different ways, not just curators planning long-term projects and deciding which artists get to use the space. I planned this whole protest that was going to happen with artists, musicians and activists. Many of these themes are relevant to artists beyond just India and Bangladesh: fascism, authoritarianism, ethnonationalism.

I’m not sure of the alchemy behind why the packets artwork have been so popular. I found the first packet on the streets of Dhaka in February 2018, before my uncle was in jail. I was with my mum and I was hungry, so I bought some samosa on the street. I noticed that the packet was made from court lists of cases of the state against citizens. There were so many thousands of these cases in authoritarian regimes that they were now appearing on throwaway food packets. Food was very important during the Shaheen Bagh movement; it is said that even the policemen loved the food there. The greeting wouldn’t be ‘How are you?’ – but ‘Have you eaten?’.

I printed the images on throwaway paper from my mum’s house. Then we were going to fill them with rice and display them in this circle in Tate Modern. Two days before the protests happened, the Tate had to shut for the Covid-19 lockdown, and the Shaheen Bagh protests were shut down by the Indian government. But by then the Instagram platform was up and running. Soon we were campaigning for other political prisoners, and artists continued to send their work. Now these samosa packets are living their best life independent of me.

Nepal Picture Library and Photo Kathmandu were hugely supportive during the Free Shahidul movement. There was a memorable time when we were trying to raise Shahidul flags wherever prime minister Sheikh Hasina visited. I was then contacting local activists and asking them to send me pictures of the protests. That was my form of ‘curating’ the images. I’m by no means a curator in the traditional sense. One of my favourite packets is by Ishan Tankha. It’s not even overtly political. It depicts coffee houses in India, where you can sit and talk about politics. I found those really beautiful. Another is by Robert Gerhardt, who has been photographing Black Lives Matter since 2014 and also showing Muslim lives in America.

“My medium still isn’t photography, though I’ve worked with many photographers. Part of campaigning for Shahidul was to engage the arts community”

None of the artists had an issue with me printing images on a home inkjet printer. The preciousness of the print – and what the print is – seemed to disappear. When I served food in the packets, a couple of photographers then did have an issue with it and said, ‘I don’t think I want my work used in that way’, which was totally fine. I’m quite clear about how these are uncontrollable objects, and they will be reproduced and the print quality will be whatever it is.

In Arles this year, there was an exhibition by Editions JOJO where people made their own packets, and earlier this year the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry did a workshop where kids and families were making samosa packets and cooking samosas. The V&A ‘acquired’ 20 packets, which we ended up donating rather than selling. They were never meant to be commercial objects, but it’s important that they’re in a permanent collection as a testimony of the struggle and the way artists have responded to it.

Photography was just one tool of many. I’m not very technical; I go to the darkroom and I know how to do what I need to. Not understanding exactly how it works keeps it interesting and magical. I’m really drawn to sculpture and its possibilities. The fact that it could be a cast or found material. It ruptures a lot of conventions that people want to assign to art – and its relationship to the body and the way it envelops it.

When I was at graduate school at Hunter College, photography was listed separately to art. In the early 2000s, there were galleries, and then there were photography galleries. I thought that was weird. Because of my family’s Colorado pictures, I honed in on this question of whether landscape photography could be contemporary. Could it be more than just an Ansel Adams image, or the romanticised image?

I was interested in the way those images would carry in a built environment like New York City. I loved the beauty of landscape imagery, but was frustrated by the photograph’s inertness – the fact that it was always being held behind the frame. There were so many conventions around photographic display, which I found ridiculous. I wanted to question, break and push back against them. There is so much possibility after the image is printed.

After graduate school, I decided to go back to the darkroom and integrate colour photography into my work. Printing my own photographs made the material less precious. I would be very playful, investigating the materiality of the C-print. 

When I moved to New York, I worked at Artists Space gallery, where I learned how to build walls. Understanding how walls sit in a space and thinking about hanging artworks are really important. A simple gesture or cutting a hole in a wall or photography surface can be powerful. I think a lot about what’s behind a photograph. I cut holes in drywalls and conceal gallery windows so that light comes through the space. What happens when you break these surfaces that are assumed to be untouchable? In each project, I’m trying to create a balance between these iconic images of nature, and a gesture, movement, or force. 

Early on I worked a lot with Styrofoam, then I started choosing materials that had a dual relationship with architecture and nature, like concrete. I began asking, ‘What’s more natural – concrete, the image of nature, or the plastic surface? The texture of rock on an image, or the actuality of it?’ 

With my concrete works, I eventually arrived at a process where I was taking C-prints and folding them and pouring concrete on the face or back of the print. The plastic nature of the paper resisted the concrete. A piece like Colorado Sunset Concrete Fold is a tenuous balance between form and the heavy material. It’s out of my control; I don’t know how they’re going to turn out. There’s this letting go – a trusting of the material process.

“What happens when you break these surfaces that are assumed to be untouchable? In each project, I’m trying to create a balance between these iconic images of nature, and a gesture, movement, or force”

In the last few years I’ve been adding materials to my vocabulary: steel, metal, UV printing. My ‘photo extrusions’ take an image from the photograph and create a giant sculpture from it, using it as an outline. Ghost of a Tree was my first architectural photographic piece in a gallery. I’d taken this photograph of a giant pine tree on a road trip during a residency. I then scaled the piece so the tree is the same size as the column.

My peers aren’t really photographers, they’re painters and sculptors. I felt a little bit of an outsider when I went to the darkroom. My practice is very tied to photography, but my studio practice is very different to what I think of as a photographer’s, because my goals are different. There is certainly a frustration at the image and failure for it to encompass the experience of being at the original site. I also find the barrier between the body and the image strange in photography – how you’re not supposed to touch the print.

 Travelling and hiking are integral to my understanding of the world and thinking about geography, geometry and materials. They’re interwoven. It’s a balance of keeping an image while pushing the form and material. How can surfaces be manipulated through constant experimentation? The reverence for the image is there, but the reverence for the material is not. I’m creating a relationship between my body and the material.

Letha Wilson, Fields of Vision, is at Grimm, London, until 30 September

My work often mixes mythology and autobiography, dealing with the representation of the body on several levels. There is my body making the work – my labour and the repetitive acts of making. Then there are the bodies I represent. The third component is the body of the work itself, often crossing from photography to sculpture. And fourth is the body of the spectator – providing a physical viewing experience is really important to me. I come from a family of cinephiles, and perhaps my interest in bodily fragmentation is related to the filmic image. It is also important to me to picture the bodies around me as they are – without post-production – to push back against beauty standards in mass media.

Shortly after I left the RCA, I showed in Ichor, a group show at Danielle Arnaud, London, which is in a house. You aren’t allowed to put nails in the walls, so with my works Slip/Slit and Bleu, I was thinking about the house as a frame and how to insert photographs in the architecture. In my 2014 residency at the V&A, I was researching the collection, which is where I found X-rays of classical sculptures of gods.

This led to the works in my first solo show, La Femme Fontaine at Matèria gallery, Rome, in 2017. There was a play between the sculptures I made, which I saw as photographs in the sense that they were so detailed – goosebumps on the concrete, for example – and the antique sculptures which became photographs. The idea was to render patriarchal gods flat, see-through and ghostlike.

My Roman Road, London, solo show, Shredded, was thinking about the stereotypes of virility rather than masculinity. It came from my interest in Greek antiquity and mythology, and from living opposite a 24-hour bodybuilding gym, where I could hear screams constantly. In bodybuilding you exercise and judge each body part individually, so I felt it related to my work through fragmentation as well. It’s the perfect intersection between sculpture and photography – the exhibition of the body.

“I come from a family of cinephiles, and perhaps my interest in bodily fragmentation is related to the filmic image”

I really believe in content and form coming together. The way the photographs become three-dimensional links to each subject; I don’t just make images 3D to make them more interesting or sexy. So the inflatables in Shredded were connected to the idea of muscles inflating and deflating, and to an infamous quote [about ejaculation] by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the cult documentary Pumping Iron. In some of the sculptures, which resembled developing trays, I used glycerine, which some bodybuilders ingest before competition to improve muscle definition. That, plus the spotlights in the installation made the photographs sweat. There were water droplets on the prints of their torsos. 

Photography is just one component of my sculptures and installations. Styx – which was adapted for my solo show at MISC, Athens – is a circular structure partly because Styx is a river and a goddess in Greek mythology. She is the boundary to the afterlife. The project was co-commissioned during the pandemic by Photoworks UK and the Ballarat International Foto Biennale; the ceiling of Australia’s National Centre for Photography, where it was going to be first shown, is made of metal from shipyards. So I made the sculpture circular to reference the movement of water. With this project, ideas of ‘going through’ and ‘seeing through’ were omnipresent. Going through an experience – as with the pandemic or mourning – or moving through water spatially, were translated in the installation with the labyrinthine form. With the use of translucent fabrics and X-rays, I communicated this idea of seeing through, too.

Alix Marie, Perasma, is at MISC, Athens, until 20 September

The space is always at the centre of my installations. That’s what inspires me to play with certain materials. The contemporary spaces I choose can take other materials in a way that traditional ones cannot. I build my work in the spaces; I want visitors to feel that the work is made for them – in a particular place and for a specific experience. 

In Switzerland, we have this practice in school where you make your own marble painting and you make a little booklet out of it to take home. I like that familiar element – connecting the viewer to childhood. A Rock is a River was about human perception. I created water and mineral photographs, then came a pictorial gesture to combine the photographs (reality) with paintings (dreams) that looked like the drawings I could find in nature. 

My work is more inspired by painters than photographers – and also mixed-media artists like Pipilotti Rist. There’s also Jonathan Meese, who isn’t abstract at all, but what I like is his expression of something personal – just doing the work, taking the space in a playful way. Meese’s work is cynical but is also funny, and it has a multi-dimensional aspect. You can always go deeper. There’s always more to discover.

I met Simon Baker, the MEP director, around 12 years ago at Offprint, when he was working at Tate. The book is at the centre of my work, so for Poetry of the Earth, we thought it would be nice to honour the printed form, which isn’t always highly valued in the art world but is dear to photographers. For me it’s the most beautiful object you can have in terms of images. I love shows, but they’re ephemeral and don’t have this intimacy with the viewer. Each space in the MEP is one ‘book’, and then other prints and installations correspond to the production period, so you can also follow my work’s evolution. Ten years ago my practice was a lot more punk and violent. Now it’s more contemplative and has a different energy. My work is becoming more beautiful but without being too nice.

There is an invitation to admire natural motives in my exhibitions which I want people to start seeing in the world around them. This is what I would like people to take from the show. So when you sit in your car and water drops on the windscreen, you can enjoy this small but beautiful moment. We could all use a little bit more beauty in our lives. I don’t want to have violence in my work anymore; there is enough violence in the world. I want to give something positive. We need to find breathing space for inspiration – to project something positive for our future.

“I build my work in the spaces; I want visitors to feel that the work is made for them – in a particular place and for a specific experience”

In 2019, analogue nature photography came back into my work. I found a couple who have 20 years’ worth of slides which are really well annotated. Usually I don’t work with found material, but on this occasion I wanted to make them alive again. It’s difficult to look at what’s happening with nature at the moment. How can we make images that make you want to look at nature and it be a pleasant experience, not something where you think ‘We’re all going to die’? 

Performances are an important aspect of my paintings. In my series Living in a Painting, I was thinking about how to share the creative image-making process with the public. I didn’t want to do this digitally, so I found overhead projectors from a school. I started to paint on transparency film, inviting musicians Julie Semoroz, Pyrit and Buvette to perform too. I’m currently making a lot of video collages which are connected to my books and the shows. They create an atmosphere and offer a relaxing moment for the people in the space.

In terms of technique, I like to look into the past and future – not to be lost in something romantic, but to explore what’s possible. There are some amazing digital tools; why not use them if it’s empowering the images? I used to photograph a lot more than I do now. It’s a bit less of everyday life, and I don’t photograph people anymore. I’m stretching photography’s motives in a different way. I like invitations to look twice at what we believe we know already.

Maya Rochat, Poetry of the Earth, is at Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, until 01 October

“I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history”

What was it like making work in the 1960s and 70s?

I always maintain I was fortunate to be born when I was, because in the 1960s we believed a revolution was possible. I was working with people who thought it was possible to change the situation the country was in. It was invigorating and exciting. I still think that is necessary, it still exists today. It’s particularly interesting now to see issues to do with race, gender and sexual identification coming forward and being expressed strongly. That’s very encouraging. I still believe we can change the world.

How do you feel about your campaigning work now? Can this kind of work sometimes stigmatise the people it tries to help?

That was an issue we discussed, especially at Camerawork and Ten.8. It’s one of the reasons I’ve enjoyed making the books because I’ve been able to correct that to some extent – to include photographs that show a wider view.

Why did you make Home and Street?

I had a major medical incident and stopped teaching in 2003. It gave me time to look at my archive, and I realised I had a significant amount of material that had never been published. Over the last few years I’ve been looking back rather than producing anything new. I don’t think historical material should be celebrated to the detriment of contemporary documentary work, but I do think it’s important to look at history. I want my work to be accessible to the public, not just to academics and researchers, because it’s part of a people’s history, and interpreting our past can help us understand our present and predict our future. We shouldn’t forget that. Since its beginning, photography has been used to document people’s lives. If you go back to the 17th century, images were very exclusive, the preserve of the rich. Photography is much more democratic.

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How do you remember your mother, as a photographer?

My mam was motivated by the desire to document real people with humanity and compassion. I grew up with her pictures as our wallpaper and was often in the darkroom with her as a child. She was in her element there, listening to her favourite music; she loved the whole process, and I’m happy that I got to share that with her.

She was fearless but also incredibly sensitive. Her approach was informal, generating an understanding of what she was doing by giving prints to the people she photographed. She was calm and was able to sit back and observe her surroundings. She learned how to read a situation from an early age – she had an education in people long before she picked up a camera.

How important was this series to your mother?

Youth Unemployment was extremely personal to my mam. The images come from a place of anger and love: anger at the situation, and love for the people. The work was a desperate plea for help for a generation of kids who were being abandoned to a lifetime of unemployment, or being nothing more than part of a cheap labour market. She shows us the bitter reality of surviving on subsistence benefits, but also the strength, and how people come together when times are hard.

What is the relevance of these photographs today?

We’re living through incredibly divided times where working-class people have been manipulated, just like the class warfare my mam warned about. She foresaw that the repercussions would be felt for years and we seem to be feeling those effects now – we are at crisis point.

Is there a photograph that was particularly meaningful to her?

Cops Piss Off [above]: the lad on the left is Tish’s youngest brother Carl, with his friends Robo and Tony, and the message on the wall is symbolic of their alienation. There was a void between them and their parents’ generation, who treated them like skivers, nagging them to get jobs when there just weren’t any.

Youth Unemployment by Tish Murtha is out now (Bluecoat Press)

I’m British, but I was born in Australia and most of my family live in South Africa. I have lived about half of my life outside the UK. Each country I have lived in has a totally different culture, which affects everything – art, design, politics and, of course, photography.

Music was very important in my teenage years. I went to see a lot of bands. Culture was tied in with fashion and music, and photography played a part in that through magazines, record covers and music videos.

I don’t think of curating as categorising photographs. I work with themes – food, fashion, motherhood – as they’re my way into a subject. Take Feast for the Eyes (2017); it’s not really about food, it’s about many other things, like still lifes across media. I wanted to examine this enduring artistic tradition – first taken from painting – and how artists have followed, borrowed from, or subverted the genre. To see how it resonates on different registers over time. I also wanted to explore when humour and play are combined with the most common of subject matters, and the senses that arise.

I started working freelance as I had lots of ideas I wanted to explore. Being bound to one institution felt stifling. I’m at my best when busy and juggling – using different parts of my brain and skills – from the very practical to deep research. Being independent has offered me so many opportunities that would never have come my way otherwise.

I stopped teaching in 2017. But the biggest changes I experienced during the 15 years that I taught were all related to wider problems within tertiary education. Cuts have had a knock-on effect regarding intake numbers, hours, facilities and time. None of it is satisfactory for students or staff.

Photo fairs are irrelevant to me. They are about the market and my career sits outside of that; they are incomparable to an exhibition space. Their role is to sell, attract collectors and gather people together. I like them for the latter – it’s nice to see friends and to connect with colleagues in one intense hit.

“To make it as a curator, you have to take it seriously and be professional. This means knowing the literature and thinking about the role of the exhibition, museum or gallery”

The smartphone and social media are the most significant changes to the medium over the last 20 years. But what is interesting is how little photography has changed. The history is the medium shifting and changing to technological advances and the world at large; that continues.

I swim, run and should do more yoga. I also spend extravagant amounts of time watching skincare and make-up tutorials. My biggest challenges have included pregnancy, early motherhood and menopause. Sometimes female experience can feel like being hit on the back of the head with a heavy spade.

Home Truths: Photography, Motherhood and Identity, my 2013 show at The Photographers’ Gallery, seems to resonate the most. The subject of maternal ambivalence is more easily examined today in museums, books and gallery spaces. This wasn’t the case a decade ago. In terms of my work today, I’m proud of To Walk in the Image at Lismore Castle Arts. It probed into ideas around faith, the land, and our place in the world. These questions seem relevant in a time of climate crisis – and will be more urgent in 100 years’ time.

To make it as a curator, you have to take it seriously and be professional. This means knowing the literature and thinking about the role of the exhibition, museum or gallery – how they communicate, your place in this ecosystem, and the audiences that attend. Also, spend time with artists and art. It always surprises me how some curators seem not to do this. People I have worked with over the years have passed on sage advice or led by example, including Sandy Nairne at the National Portrait Gallery, Andrew Renton, my PhD supervisor, and curator Val Williams.