I don’t think I became a photographer because I grew up around photography. In some ways, I became one because I grew up watching my father wait. He would stand somewhere, sometimes seemingly doing nothing, looking, observing, waiting for something to happen. When I was younger, I didn’t understand what he was waiting for. Now I realise he was waiting for life to reveal itself, to perform for him.
I grew up being surrounded by photographs, negatives and contact sheets but I never felt that I had to become a photographer. In fact, for a long time, I resisted the idea of being defined by my father’s work, but I also loved being his daughter. Eventually, I realised that I wasn’t interested in photographing the way he did. I was interested in understanding why he looked. That distinction became important to me.
He taught me that the camera is almost secondary. The real act of photography happens before you lift it. It happens in the way you enter a space, the way you look at a person, the patience you have to allow something to happen without forcing it.
He used to see us on our phones and ask, “What is so important? Look outside the window. The world is passing you by.” I think about that constantly now.
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Digital and social media have made images incredibly immediate, but sometimes that immediacy comes at the cost of looking. A photograph used to ask you to stay with something. Now we often ask a photograph to perform for us for a few seconds before we scroll past it. For me, photography has become a way of resisting that speed. It has taught me to wait.
Over the years, photography has also taken me to places I could never have imagined visiting otherwise. It has allowed me into people’s homes, workshops, streets and lives. I have photographed people whose circumstances are completely different from mine, and yet there are always moments of recognition. A gesture, a look, a silence, something that reminds you how similar we are beneath all our differences. That is probably what keeps me photographing.
And then came the Pirelli Calendar 2027 that for the first time, turned its gaze to India. What began as a professional assignment became something deeply personal after my father’s passing. I had to confront the strange question of what it means to carry someone’s legacy without becoming a continuation of them. I couldn’t photograph like my father. I didn’t want to. But I could carry the values he taught me: curiosity, patience, honesty and a genuine interest in people. Working on the calendar after he was gone made me realise that inheritance isn’t something fixed that you receive and preserve. It changes as it passes through you.
I also found myself thinking about the difference between memory and experience. My father used to call the head an “in-built memory card”. It can only tell you what it has already seen. To really see something, you have to be present enough to experience it for the first time. That has become one of the most important lessons in my life.
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Photography, for me, is ultimately about being present. It is about standing somewhere long enough for the unexpected to happen. It is about looking at someone without deciding who they are before you’ve really seen them. It is about allowing a place to contradict the idea you arrived with. And perhaps that is what I have learnt most from the last decade — not how to take better photographs, but how to look and observe better.
My father’s passing changed my relationship with photography in ways I am still discovering. I find him in my viewfinder, but not necessarily in the moment I take the photograph. I find him in the moment before it, in the waiting, in the uncertainty, in knowing that something might happen and being ready when it does.
In a world that is constantly asking us to hurry, photography has given me the permission to pause. To peer outside the window. To let the world pass by. And to simply be there when it does.
