Vicinity

In 2013 while I was away on an assignment my entire studio burnt down. It was an irreversible loss for me. Not only physically to my studio and all my equipment but also most of my important negatives. These were negatives and photographs I had been shooting for over 20 years, most of it on a large format camera. I was devastated by this loss of my work 

Strangely enough, I found a big bunch of my negative which were singed and unusable but saved. They were half burnt and sticking together because of moisture. These images that were mutilated and had lost what they stood for now became an alternate reality for me and as I examined them more they took on a new life and I found these different worlds which existed within them. This was partly fantasy and partly the reality of the accident. So instead of looking for pictures in an exterior world, in this case the material became my canvas . The loss had created a whole new life . Usually we use film to capture a subject, this time the film itself became my subject.

Now as I continue to explore the destroyed, almost metamorphosed world of my negatives,  they seem to have a parallel in life itself. How we make sense of this new reality, what we take forward from here and the ambiguity and uncertainty of our times. We are in uncharted territory.

I often submerge myself in this world to find images as much to see the past as the future .

The images reflect on the modern times and work as a metaphor, towards the Evolution of the human race, to technology AI and environmental crisis.