A photographer strives to archive the ordinary expressions of everyday life as an examination of the self, family and belonging.
In the last and final installment of our three-part stories following the migration trail, we finish with a unique artist, Anu Kumar from Melbourne, who moved from Delhi when she was only eight months old.
Her career in photography was by chance. This realisation made her connect with her roots to understand her displacement from her heritage and her town of Kavi Nagar, and her identity as a woman. In the process, she defined herself as the artist raised in Australia.
That’s the meaning of her collection at the latest ‘Melbourne Now’, an initiative by NGV at the Ian Potter Centre, Federation Square.
Kumar’s photography has been published in the New York Times and Vogue Italia and was recently exhibited at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography (2022).
Photography is a very insular field within the art world, but it's also its own. Kumar, now thirty-two, talks about loneliness and finding herself as an artist.
She did two years of occupational therapy at Monash University like any good Indian daughter to keep the parents happy. But, because she didn't have the passion, she ended up failing her exams. They gave her an option: repeat the year or quit. So, she quit.
Kumar went overseas, ending up in Nepal and India for about six months.
Kumar was never someone to take photos at all and didn’t have a camera. Kumar’s older brother called her a Luddite, resisting all technologies. Then, on her nineteenth birthday her dad bought her a DSLR, an entry-level Canon.
She thought ‘why not?’ Kumar started taking photos and really liked it, eventually applying to RMIT for courses in commercial photography.
In-between her three years in RMIT, Kumar got a job as a journalist at The Age, thinking it was her dream job at the time. But photojournalism wasn't quite right for her. Kumar points out that she was glad she did it because sometimes one needs to try new things to know what they don't like.
The turning point came when she was in her mother’s family house in Ghaziabad. Spending a lot of time going back and forth there, Kumar ended up taking photographs, switching her digital camera with a film camera.
She thought that completely changed the game. It wasn't even so much how the images looked, but the process for her was just a lot more enjoyable.
Kumar still thinks she wouldn’t still be a photographer today if she was working with her digital camera. She started photographing her town and family, giving birth to a series of collections.
An extensive archive of her family images has taken its own cycle of time, work, and dedication; it started with one of her first photos for this series, back in 2013–14. Ghar, published by Perimeter Books, takes us into the world of Kumar back in Kavi Nagar. Kumar has just come off a book tour for Ghar; she went to New York, Paris, London and Delhi.
Between her books and exhibitions, Kumar dedicates time as a part-time assistant in Melbourne at Niagar Galleries, giving her the space and time to create more stories but predominantly making her living from photography.
As an artist, she’s not going to restrict herself only representing India.
She has thought about this quite a lot because she doesn’t want to limit herself in that way. But at the same time, she thinks that this is an ongoing exploration.
In retrospect, Kumar feels like she has a kind of insight into India; she feels like she’s not sure she would feel comfortable telling a story that's not hers.
The responses from other Indians are filled with gracious sentiments of her showcasing India in a way that feels familiar and nostalgic to them. “I don't feel like I need to be pushing myself in a direction just for the challenge … My priority is small … I like it, that something in me, I'm excited by it.”
With a career spanning more than a decade, worshipping Dayanita Singh (Indian photographer) as her idol, Kumar the artist is familiarising herself with India each time she visits – but there will always be that slight distance on knowing each other completely.
Kumar feels privileged to have two families in two worlds. Growing up, she didn’t have access to understanding her favourite artists; it wasn't something that was a priority in her household (not faulting her family for it at all). But sometimes the art world can feel completely alien to Kumar.
But Melbourne has exploded with so many artists from South Asia that it’s hard to keep the enthusiasm down. ‘Melbourne Now’ is a grand showcase of this, from 24 March – 20 August 2023 with free entry.
The story of an artist is no different to a migrant, an artist constantly working through the arts in loneliness, trying to make sense of herself and her art to connect to the past. Whereas the migrant is silently trying to balance this crisis – either being fearful, brave, or capturing life in a lens encompassing the layers of human stories.
Concluding these three-part stories has made me ponder the invisible thread of a migrant’s life.
The lens of a photographer can tell a bigger story of that tussle.
The question is whether she has inherited the right to tell stories of an India she has yet to fully explore; a third ‘cultural kid’ dilemma, or simply something that comes with being a photographer?
By Nandita Chakraborty