EASTWARD

Explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard

Photography, as a mode of witnessing, makes visible the relational dynamic between photographer and subject. With eastward: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard, Sunhil Sippy brings this dynamic into play through the frailty and beauty he locates within ecosystems of decay, development and industry. Cultivating a raw and unfiltered engagement with the material world and its lingering stillness, he presents an archive of a less-frequented stretch of his city, now increasingly drawn into the ambitions of urban expansion.

It is important to note that Sunhil returns to the same places time and again, not to document change, but to feel spaces and observe them. He stretches the boundaries of his medium, moving between analog and digital formats, as well as experimenting with double exposure and formerly discarded negatives. The photograph is rendered not simply as a form of representation, but also as a material object. The textures that his photographs carry—their tonality, their surfaces of lightness, density and graininess—are all integral to how his chosen locales are perceived.

In his more recent photographs, Sunhil has avoided the use of the viewfinder, allowing him to look directly at the landscape or subject rather than through the mediating frame of the camera. This gestures toward a reorientation of image making, one that privileges intuition and emotional responsiveness. Sunhil’s photographs then emerge as an affective encounter, exceeding composition and intent, registering instead through what moves or unsettles the viewer. With this exhibition, he makes us privy to his own emotional consciousness.