A PAIR OF BODIES CONTORT; AN ungainly embrace of sinew and muscle on brown earth. The air is pricked with heat. One of the men, his face turned towards the viewer, has his eyes closed. To an eye, without context, the image might appear piercingly intimate, homoerotic even. Although the photograph feels familiarly Indian, it refuses to be moored to a singular association. Is the viewer witnessing intimacy, sport, ritual or stereotype? It is that sense of messy uneasiness—of denying neat answers to the viewer—that makes the photograph compelling. It nudges the viewer into a more self-aware mode of looking: to question their assumptions and be mindful of histories that shape them.
The photograph belongs to Aaryan Sinha’s series titled Namaste or Whatever. Sinha recently won the Aperture Portfolio Prize 2026, a respected international platform that recognises and champions emerging talent in the world of contemporary photography. Sinha chases clichés— stock imagery that has served as capsule representation of India in the past. Think, dupatta-clad schoolgirls with braided hair, red temple walls patterned by a flurry of white handprints, a funerary pyre set ablaze by the river—but he removes them from their familiar surroundings. What remains then, is less documentary, but an image made strange by context withheld.
The effect is even more pronounced in photographs that verge on the surreal. In one, a glassblower’s head seems trapped in a giant diaphanous bauble. In another, a young girl cradles a goat. The composition, stained in hues of dark moss, spills into the macabre. Rendered almost featureless during the editing process, the girl takes on a ghoulish persona—her darkened grip tightening around the unwitting animal. The sequins on her kurta catch light.
Sinha made that photograph in Jodhpur while visiting a village almost by happenstance. This was before Namaste or Whatever had taken shape. The children gathered around him, fascinated by the camera in his hands. One of the girls picked up a pet goat and posed. “The first thought that came to my mind was, ‘This is such a cliché’,” recalls Sinha. He took the picture perfunctorily and set it aside, never thinking of it again. “If you look at the original photo, it was taken in broad daylight,” he says. It also concerned him that the photograph was of a minor. It wasn’t until much later, while tinkering with the image in the dim hours before dawn, that he reworked it “to a point where you can’t see her face anymore.”
A graduate of the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, the Netherlands, Sinha was the only Indian in his class for the first two years. He felt that people there often misconstrued and stereotyped his culture. Sinha’s series, Namaste or Whatever emerged from an attempt to review, dismantle and recalibrate the ways in which India has been predominantly perceived and depicted through the Western gaze of photography. It’s an inquiry into image-making, representation and who gets to tell what story.
He recalls deep-diving into the history of colonisation and photography for his thesis at the Royal Academy of Arts. It led him to The People of India (1868-1875), a mammoth survey and ethnographic documentation carried out by the British India Office in the 19th century to classify Indians according to caste, community and inherited occupation. Produced in the aftermath of the 1857 Uprising, The People of India furthered the imperial agenda by cataloguing Indian society, enabling the British Raj to exercise firmer administrative control. “I realised that photography was introduced in India by the British and it became of the most successful tools for advancing the colonial empire,” explains Sinha. That discovery marked a turning point in his thinking: photography was not simply a means of documentation. It could also function as an instrument of propaganda or, conversely, as a vehicle for socio-political commentary.
The discovery also shaped Sinha's practice of “reappropriating” colonial visual stereotypes and reworking them with nuance. There is honesty in his images; no unnecessary gloss or gimmick. “I try to look at things with childlike wonder, one where I don’t know the rules,” he explains, adding that the nuance emerges during the editing and research process, as photography is as much about what you leave out as what you include in the frame.
Sinha grew up in a household that celebrates the arts. With parents who were in the production business, many of his earliest memories involved trailing along with them to shoots and lingering on sets. “I was surrounded by photography all the time,” Sinha says. At 13 (or 14, he can’t accurately recall), he was gifted his first camera. Soon, he was photographing family, friends and whatever else held his attention. He admits he wasn’t good at academics or sports, and the camera offered an alternative vocabulary he was drawn to. “Photography was the one thing that gave me a reason and a way to connect to people,” he says.
That instinct continues to inform his work. His ongoing project, This Isn't Divide and Conquer, follows a more conventional trajectory of documentary photography. In 2022, Sinha began capturing the landscapes and people belonging to the five Indian states that share a border with Pakistan. It’s an attempt, Sinha muses, to understand the scarring consequences of Partition that brutally, and in haste, tore a country apart. The imagery stirs a sombre spell: broken, beaten-down landscapes; a solitary temple against a dry, mountainous terrain; a boy’s bony body jutting out like a branch from a tree. The grittiness of each frame evokes long-standing, generational hardship. “Every photographer has a story they want to tell. I have always tried to seek what I want to address through my work. For me, the overarching question is: ‘What is the notion of Indian identity?’”
Through his photographs, Sinha invites us to look at images with more attention rather than easy consumption. In doing so, he wants us recognise that what we call “India” in a photograph, might be a story made by someone else.
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