Ranjish

This long-term project is about the precarity of public life in the urban sprawl of Karachi—Pakistan's fastest growing megacity—and the constant struggle to maintain one’s dignity within it.

The pictures included here are an excerpt from a long-term photography project I have been developing for the last three years in my hometown of Karachi, Pakistan. The project is titled 'Ranjish'—or ‘estrangement’ in english—and is a nod to a widely beloved Urdu ghazal about love and separation that was written by poet Ahmed Faraz. In the context of my series it refers to the broken social contract between a city and its people, and speaks to the precarity of public life in the urban sprawl of Karachi—Pakistan's fastest growing megacity—and the constant struggle to maintain one’s dignity within it.

These pictures were made all over the city; from the resettlement camps around vast and wasteful infrastructure projects and impoverished townships, to overcrowded bazaars, street festivals and neglected public parks. While the breadth of the project takes inspiration from humanist works such as Robert Frank’s The Americans and Nikos Economopolous’s In the Balkans, my moral concerns in this series also extend beyond human life to other species and objects that co-habit Karachi, such as stray and subjugated animals and the fast-depleting native plant species slowly disappearing beneath concrete.