Personal is Political

For the PHMuseum 2017 Women Photographers Grant, I intend to continue to delve deeper into my own immigrant narrative, engaging with its personal but increasingly, if accidentally, political context.

Personal is Political – Priya Kambli

For the PHMuseum 2017 Women Photographers Grant, I intend to continue to delve deeper into my own immigrant narrative, engaging with its personal but increasingly, if accidentally, political context. The grant will allow me to respond to the recent heightening of anti-immigrant rhetoric which has altered the context in which migrant voices like mine are heard. In this altered reality the meaning of our stories has become increasingly political. I will use this opportunity to create new work that pushes my investigation of my own emigration and the challenges of cross-cultural understanding, providing a much-needed personal perspective on the fragmentation of family, identity, and culture that are part of the migrant experience. I envision this new work as tapping into subversive reserves of creative play as opposed to a more didactic approach; I want to create work that winks, pokes, and inverts the past and the present - suggesting joyousness, mixed with the loss and regret that accompanies us all.

My artwork is intrinsically tied to my own family’s photographic legacy and my move at age 18, a few years after the death of my parents, from India to the United States. Before I emigrated, my sister and I split our photographic inheritance arbitrarily and irreparably in half. One portion remained with her, and the other was displaced along with me, here in America. For the past decade, this archive of family photographs has been my primary source material in creating bodies of work which explore the migrant narrative and experience; albeit through a personal lens. While my need to decipher and address my family photographs is personal, my work has always touched upon universal themes, with the potential to start a dialogue about cultural differences and universal similarities. In the last year or two those private references and broad themes have taken on a new public significance that requires a creative response.

In conclusion, I plan to pursue a new work, both in present day India and the United States, expanding the range of images and materials at my disposal. Re-examining the materials, images, and the natural light found in my American home and back in India, I will return to the conceptual source of my work to address the increasing relevance of the migrant experience and the importance of hearing minority voices.