Mémoire Temporelle operates from a position of distance between a life lived in London and an inherited relationship to India shaped through memory and imagination.Developed over several journeys to Mumbai, the work constructs fragments of a parallel life. Encounters move between chance and staging; figures shift between presence and projection.The images do not document place, but propose a speculative biography.Working between observation and fiction, the photograph is treated as a site of negotiation rather than evidence. Distance, framing, and obstruction are used to foreground the conditions of looking.The sequence unfolds through association rather than narrative, with recurring motifs linking images across time.The work extends an ongoing investigation into identity under conditions of displacement—where the self is not recovered, but imagined."What is it to imagine another life ? What are Memories ? Some stay others fade some we imagine and they become another life. I chose to relive another life in Bombay, it was always Bombay to me before it became Mumbai. Jamnadas, my grandfather ran away from Gujerat at 14 years old to live on the streets of Bombay for a few years before embarking to Rangoon, Karachi, Jamnagar and Junagadh and then to Nairobi and finally to London. What if he had stayed in Bombay it is that I imagined.&nbsp;" Kalpesh Lathigra

Memoire Temporelle

A Democratic Portrait interrogates the photographic portrait as a tool of identification, authority, and belonging. It considers how images govern social and civic recognition and asks who is permitted visibility.Using a Polaroid Studio Express, the same camera used for passport photos, Lathigra makes images of subjects from across society: refugees, family, friends, cultural figures, and public officials. Each portrait treats the sitter with the same visual authority, creating a uniform field where social hierarchies are suspended.By standardising pose, gaze, and format, the work exposes the structures embedded in identification photography. Expression and stance become subtle negotiations of presence, autonomy, and power. The photograph is not a likeness but a reflection of the mechanisms by which images confer recognition.The series functions as an egalitarian assemblage. Every image carries equal weight, removing aesthetic or celebrity hierarchies. The uniformity foregrounds the apparatus of portraiture itself rather than individual subjectivity. A Democratic Portrait interrogates the systems that mediate visibility and recognition.How do images confer belonging? How are identities legitimized through representation? What happens when the apparatus of the portrait is stripped to neutrality?The work extends the ongoing investigation into identity, memory, and representation across visual systems.

A Democratic Portrait

Lost in The Wilderness

Afghanistan

Discarded Fruit

Nim & Other Stories #WIP

The act of letting go is a discipline of unlearning all that has passed.&nbsp;An expectation of making a photograph within the parameters of what is deemed a good photograph is laying a trap. A falsehood of desire to please the audience.It is failure that succeeds and allows one to thrive, evolve and question.