Debsuddha (Calcutta, 1989) is a photographer with a clear vision of the role of photography today. Like any form of art, it is first and foremost a bridge to communicate, a means to build relationships and understand people, places and cultures more deeply. This idea finds full expression in his project Crossroads, winner of the Prix du Livre Images Vevey 2023/2024 and published by Éditions Images Vevey in September 2024.

Wrapped in the soft light of the house, his shots tell the daily life of Swati and Gayatri Goswami, the photographer's aunts, who have spent their entire lives in their home residence in Hatibagan, in the north of Calcutta. The two sisters, both albinos, have suffered discrimination from both society and their own family. Nevertheless, Swati and Gayatri have built relationships beyond the walls of home, through their artistic passions and practices and the creation of a music school. This opening to the outside is also reflected in Debsuddha's approach, who began to portray them in 2020, during the pandemic. In fact, the deep meaning of his work lies in his vision of photography as an open language, capable of offering each observer the freedom to create an intimate connection with the narrated story. Crossroads is a project that raises questions not only about the role of photography as a social practice, but also about issues that are more relevant today than ever: how are relationships built? How much time and space are needed for them to grow and last? Is the time of a lifetime and the space of a house enough?

This opening to the outside is also reflected in Debsuddha's approach, who began to portray them in 2020, during the pandemic. In fact, the deep meaning of his work lies in his vision of photography as an open language, capable of offering each observer the freedom to create an intimate connection with the narrated story.

Crossroads raises questions not only about photography as a social practice, but also about issues that are more relevant than ever: how are relationships built? How much time and space are needed for them to grow and last? Is a lifetime, or a single house, enough?

The house of Swati and Gayatri presents itself as an intimate and welcoming theatre. The building, built 169 years ago, is located in the oldest district of the city, where the proximity of the houses limits the entry of natural light, forcing residents to rely on artificial lighting even during the day. Debsuddha remembers his impressions: "That house was a refuge, a place to build bonds and create. Instead of going out with friends, they lived within those walls, who became witnesses of their lives. There they created a school of music, a sanctuary of expression and protection. Every holiday or weekend I went back to that house, two hours by car from mine, to find my emotional refuge». Debsuddha's photographs evoke Bachelard's reflections on the "true houses of memory": houses that contain the imagination of those who inhabit them and that to be authentic "must preserve their penumbra", since describing them would mean revealing them completely, depriving them of their imaginative and poetic power. The twilights in the photographer's shots hide what is not necessary to see, while revealing the deep connection between Swati and Gayatri with the space in which they live. For this evocative force, Crossroads is also a poetic work: it does not describe, but suggests; it does not transmit a direct message, but arouses sensations. Poetry in this sense is not a genre, but the attempt to grasp the imperceptible connections hidden in life, demonstrating a deep awareness of the world. Through her poetic gaze, Debsuddha invites us to reflect on broader political and social structures, on the importance of listening and slowness in building alternative models of life. The poetic and social charge that shines through in his photographs reflects the strength with which Swati and Gayatri have transformed a life of isolation into a house of love, in which relationships take shape through mutual care, the sharing of common passions and the creation of new forms of collectivity outside the pre-established social rules.

Leafing through the pages of Crossroads, published by Éditions Images Vevey, the picture-like story of that emotional house unfolds delicately: the faces of Swati and Gayatri emerge from the twilight like two moons, while the objects and surfaces of the house become fragments that reconnect their dreams and desires. This connection emerges visually through the sensitive gaze of the photographer who sculpts the rhythm of their movements: "They dance because they know space, they know how to move," says Debsuddha. The visual journey also takes us outside the house in Hatibagan, on the beach of Puri (Odisha, India). These images, made in the early hours of the morning, before the mist envelops the camera lens and the landscape, are the metaphor of their hopes for life: "In our culture it is said that the sea absorbs your thoughts and your sadness, listening without judging. His murmur, if you screamed in front of him, would make him lose your voice in his sound," the photographer continues.

In this sense, Crossroads is also a poetic work: it does not describe, but suggests; it does not dictate, but evokes. Poetry here is not a genre, but a way of perceiving the imperceptible links that define life — a form of awareness.

Through this poetic gaze, Debsuddha explores broader political and social realities, celebrating the slowness and sensitivity needed to build meaningful relationships. His aunts turned a life of social exclusion into one of resilience, love, and quiet collectivity through their home and their art.

The word that is most associated with these images is "listening". In an era when the number of attentive listeners is decreasing, the artist's approach highlights how listening is more important than the moment of the shot itself: an act of kindness that is part of the photographer's responsibilities. «When I listen, I keep in my mind what is said and, with time, I can understand it better. Through listening, the pre-visualization of the image is developed, and from there our work begins. Then, in the field, the process can take an unexpected direction, but listening remains fundamental, because it stimulates thinking and enriches vision," explains Debsuddha. These reflections recall the dualism of photography, where its limit coincides with its power. Photography captures a situation that belongs to a precise time and space. However, looking at an image, we cannot know what happened before the shot, nor what collaboration is hidden behind what we are observing. Yet it is precisely from that lack that its imaginative and poetic strength springs, that is, its ability to open spaces for interpretation, as well as to generate new relationships, real or mental, opening the way to different possibilities of understanding and dialogue.

Crossroads is deeply part of the current context, in which we witness the exhaustion of physical space and the progressive shift towards new virtual spaces of communication, where listening, as a conscious practice, tends to be lost. Perhaps an incentive to question these changes is found between the pages of the book. The hands of the aunts, which sometimes intertwine and other times are immersed in reading, taking care of plants or other activities, create a silent dance that unites the photographs. Metaphor of union, collectivity, home and dialogue, these hands that move the observer from the house of Swati and Gayatri to the sea, convey the idea that it is not so much time or space that counts, but empathy: the act of going towards with awareness. Towards an image, towards the Other, as long as it is a movement towards something or someone, listening, ready to grasp the unexpected.

In north Kolkata, among the numerous tumbledown mansions, stands one particular 19th-century home whose rickety staircases, leaking roof and peeling walls have been like a second home for the photographer Debsuddha. His aunts, Gayatri (pictured left) and Swati, were born and raised in the house, and he has spent time with them there ever since he was a child. “They and their residence have always been a safe place,” he tells me. Both women were highly educated; Gayatri had a PhD in Sanskrit language from Jadavpur University, and Swati was a postgrad candidate in music. But prejudice surrounding their albinism made it impossible for them to find work. Instead, they set up a music school in their home. “Gayatri was the main protagonist,” says Debsuddha. “She scripted plays to perform onstage by adapting stories from Bengali and English literature. She was somewhat obsessed with Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. Swati composed and orchestrated the music and songs, and mentored me, my brother and sister along with a large group of students acting in the plays and dance dramas.”

As the sisters grew older and unable to teach, they became more isolated. As they rarely ventured out, the mansion was their whole world and, when the pandemic hit, that separation from the outside became more acute. It was then that Debsuddha decided to focus his lens on his aunts. “The pandemic forced me to think about them because their entire life has been in social isolation. They understand it far better than us.” Visiting the sisters weekly, Debsuddha created a photographic portrait of their lives. The resulting book, Crossroads, is nominated for the prestigious Kraszna- Krausz Book Award, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. The images in it, tender and sweet, are imbued with a rhythm and musicality reflective of the women’s lives. The backdrop of the ageing house is like another character. The lives of Gayatri (who died in 2023) and Swati were marked by pain, and an unquestionable fragility emanates from the images in Crossroads. Yet what we see too is a depiction of love, strength and resilience.

Quiet but moving, Crossroads is an intriguing book about Debsuddha’s two aunts, Gayatri and Swati Goswami, which also reads as a meditation on vision and how we engage with the world. Gayatri and Swati were born in Kolkata with albinism, which meant they have impaired sight and have also faced a lifetime of social ostracism; most of the images show them at home, a refuge which might also sometimes be a confinement. But as Debsuddha makes clear, the sisters have rich lives. His images record them playing music or embracing each other, reading, or dipping their hands into water. An inserted text reproduces a handwritten poem; at the end there is an archive photograph of them as young women, wearing dark glasses and badass expressions. The house is often dimly lit and therefore the images too; the women’s pale skin and hair glow luminously in many shots. There are also photographs in which the scene is bleached virtually out of view, and front and end papers that are almost inscrutably black.

Photography relies on sight but Debsuddha’s aunts depend more on other senses, especially touch or hearing, senses which are somehow receding in an increasingly ocular-centric world. But the aunts’ sensitivity and intelligence are suggested by their expressive hands and thoughtful faces; Debsuddha’s images also imply his own emotional intelligence, a willingness to truly engage with – or ‘see’ – the other. Debsuddha’s patience comes across in other ways too. He showed an early version of this work at Bristol Photo Festival in 2021, when he was part of the CATALYST Mentorship programme; BPF director Alejandro Acín has designed and sequenced this book. Crossroads is published with Éditions Images Vevey, which exhibited the images in 2024; the dummy of the book was awarded the Books Award of the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2023–24. Both festivals deserve credit for their work in the photography ecosystem, though Debsuddha stands out for his commitment to an easily overlooked story.

Othering, debated through the discourse of reading the camera as a difference machine, seems at the crux of much of photography’s woes. Challenged by the notion that the machine is neutral in its observational and technical ability, the authorship and cultural means of producing images are undergoing a fruitful re-assessment — not only in terms of representation, but also in the colonial and economic developments that have shaped the medium. Images are being questioned alongside intentions. Relationships between subject and author are scrutinized, as is the lens through which society views its subjects.

Recent conversations around class, colonialism, gender, and race have risen to the forefront in examining photography’s power dynamics — especially the role of the author versus the subject. While many consider photography a force for social change, its long, troubled history includes usage as a tool for oppression, social engineering, and visual categorization. From this lens, photography has too often been an agent of hierarchy — a point starkly evidenced in its use by eugenicists and in colonial projects.

Humanity’s richness lies in its physical, cultural, and genetic differences, yet mainstream societies continue to struggle with the acceptance of otherness. Despite idealistic notions of morality and inclusion, we know — as thinkers like Foucault have shown — that society frequently distances itself from its outliers. Through exclusion and marginalization, it reinforces the median experience as the only acceptable one.

And such is the case of Gayatri and Swati Goswami, artist Debsuddha’s two aunts. Born with albinism in a deeply caste-oriented Indian society, their very existence challenges norms. Their lives have unfolded in relative seclusion within their ancestral 167-year-old residence in north Kolkata. This home, while limiting in its exposure to society, has also protected them from a world eager to exoticize or reject their difference.

At first glance, one might perceive the sisters’ lives as isolated and melancholic. But under Debsuddha’s lens, the house becomes both haven and dreamscape — a rich, winding setting where the sisters exist in moments of quiet grace. He captures them both close together and apart, reflecting intimacy, resilience, and a quiet defiance.

There is, indeed, a melancholic tone to the book. But it is tempered by the warmth between the sisters, and the subtle tones of lavender and aquamarine that seep through the images. These hues soften their pale features and transform the space around them into something tender and even hopeful. This visual language invokes magical realism — an imagined world where the marginalized are mythologized, not pitied. The sisters’ reality, under this lens, becomes poetic and enduring.

Debsuddha’s position — both as photographer and family member — lends a humane intimacy to the project. His imagery transcends voyeurism, offering instead a gesture of compassion and understanding. It is a visual exercise in reimagining identity and dignity, turning the camera away from its legacy as a difference machine and using it, instead, as a vessel of empathy.

Crossroads is a beautiful book. It gently asks viewers to abandon binary classifications and fixed definitions of worth. It offers instead the possibility that we might see the people we’ve misunderstood — and in doing so, reclaim the better angels of our nature. It is an invitation to see with grace, not judgment; to embrace the outliers for who they are, not for what society imagines them to be.

Dal 2020 il fotografo indiano Debsuddha lavora alla serie Belonging, in cui racconta la vita delle sue zie, Swati e Gayatri Goswami, che vivono a Calcutta. Le due sorelle sono albine e per questo motivo sono sempre state discriminate dalla società e costrette a vivere quasi del tutto isolate. “Le mie zie sanno bene cosa significa rimanere segregate in casa, ma le misure di confinamento imposte durante la pandemia di covid-19 hanno peggiorato la situazione perché hanno reso il loro mondo ancora più ristretto”, racconta il fotografo. Nelle sue immagini Debsuddha vuole raccontare la forza e la resistenza delle due donne, a cui si è

riavvicinato negli ultimi anni. “Voglio raccontare la loro battaglia e il coraggio con cui la affrontano. E documentare tutto ciò di cui si circondano e a cui sono legate, i loro sogni e speranze”. Per il progetto Debsuddha ha chiesto alle due donne di posare per ricostruire alcune scene della loro vita quotidiana, in grado di evocare metaforicamente la loro reclusione. “Vorrei riflettere sulle loro emozioni, sulla frustrazione, la rabbia, la delusione, ma anche sul loro sostegno reciproco. Negli anni hanno dovuto ripensare molto alla loro vita personale e agli affetti, che non possono esprimere liberamente”.

‘Oh, you want to know my background history!’ Debsuddha seemed amused but also surprised at my interest in knowing how he came to be a photographer. But as he delved into his journey, it became apparent to me that understanding the path he took to develop his artistic voice and medium hinted at a vital key to situating the ‘whys’ of his practice. Why photography? Why make bodies of work that seem to emanate from such deep recesses of the human condition? Why does Debsuddha seem to need photography, and not merely as a tool of expression? 

Reminiscence, a body of work that is an extended part of his on-going work “Departure”, Debsuddha began under the aegis of the 2022 Arttaca Grant for Photography, was where our conversation began. It holds photographs Debsuddha made of himself at the beach, but they hold none of the golden light and warmth that a beach generally brings to mind. Instead, this is a mysterious, twilight landscape, and it feels like a cold, wet and somewhat disconcerting dream. These are photographs that are working through something, and you feel it. Debsuddha’s father passed away from Covid -19 last year. They shared a difficult and complicated relationship with each other. ‘In fact, the last couple of years had been better; we were coming to understand one another somewhat, and slowly shedding some of the ‘dad ego’ and the ‘son ego’, after many years of pain. But then, everything changed, dramatically’. Debsuddha says that he had been attempting to run from the confusion and the pain, but that eventually, it was the struggle that led him into this work. 

The sea here is formless, endless, horizonless. Debsuddha can be seen changeably as running headlong into it, trying to escape the incoming rush of waves, floating in a soothing calm or seeming to drown in the frothy, watery expanse. There is no way to know time; in fact, there is no time here. But you can almost taste the salt in the air. ‘I am

psychologically very tired’, says Debsuddha, and a dull ache of exhaustion is palpable in Reminiscence. Photographs are slices hewn off real, moving time, but each photograph is also a fount from which time is constantly pouring, providing a space to feel. And yet, despite its weight, these images do not sink you. You manage to come up for air, as you would when swimming against the current of grief. And there is space for rest and silence, amidst the slow ebb and flow of the tide.

Debsuddha likes to say ‘life is predestined’. He aspired to be an artist when he was young, and even got into the prestigious Government College of Art, Kolkata, right after school. He even knew he wanted to study photography there, opting for it rather than more traditional disciplines like painting. But circumstances in his family made him drop out of the program and opt for a more ‘sensible’ degree in engineering instead. Post this he tried working at an IT company, and later gave tuitions in maths and science for students in his neighbourhood, but eventually, photography found its way back to him. Gradually, Debsuddha started taking up assignments as a photojournalist, and in the midst of working on short term stories, began to study the work of other photographers.

As is the case for many of us in the global south, his study took the well-traversed journey of moving from an appreciation of photojournalism made from a distinctively Western perspective, towards a growing appreciation of work made in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh and Nepal along with India. According to Debsuddha, it was the work of contemporary photographers from this region that really expanded what photography could be for him, and in a way, gave him permission to take his work beyond immediate journalistic impulses into a far deeper plane. 

Debsuddha’s first body of work to gain critical acclaim has been the ongoing series titled

Belonging. Through it, we gain a glimpse into the lives of his aunts, Gayatri and Swati Goswami, who are albino, and live a life largely of seclusion in their ancestral home in north Kolkata. Debsuddha began photographing his aunts during India’s first full-scale Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020. It was a time when over 1.5 billion people were facing some of the most stringent quarantine measures in the world, but for the Goswami sisters, isolation and seclusion were nothing new. All their lives, they have faced intense scrutiny followed by discrimination and even fear from people around them due to their condition. As they grew up and aged, the sisters retreated further into the confines of their home, where they could be safe from prying eyes and judgement.

Intriguingly, although photography by its very nature is a medium that opens up lives to both prying eyes as well as judgement, we find neither in Debsuddha’s photographs of his aunts. Rather,

these images feel like an oasis. Cool-toned and quiet, they are meditative, even in their moments of playfulness. The sisters' comfort and familiarity with Debsuddha and his camera is lovingly evident. They care for him, as he for them, and the photographs are a distilled essence of this care. 

Life is predestined, and photography found its way back to Debsuddha, as it was meant to be. But for Debsuddha, it is not simply a medium or a tool to depict the world, or explain its issues. Rather, it seems that for him, the making of images is a way to truly be alive – to be open and vulnerable, to be willing to feel pain, loss and grief, feelings almost too much to bear in ordinary life. But also, crucially, to accept and celebrate deep love, care and affection, to engage in play and laughter, and to celebrate what it feels like to live. So, his work does not ever explain what it means to suffer or to burst with joy, but when you encounter it, you cannot help but feel it.

Belonging is a story about two sisters, about two aunts, it’s about a run-down house in the suburbs of Kolkata, it’s about rejection, frustration, and confinement. It’s about all those things, but more than anything, it is about love; the love the sisters feel for each other, the support they have given each other over their entirety of their lives, and the love the photographer feels for them.

The two sisters are called Gayatri and Swati Goswami and they have lived together for most of their adult life. They have studied and worked, but neither of them ever married due to their albinism. Instead they have created a home that is a sanctuary from the outside world, a world that can be cruel and spiteful to those who are different in some way.

The photographer is their nephew, Debsuddha (and as a statement of interest, I first saw these images when Debsuddha was a mentee of mine on the Catalyst Programme). As a child his aunts took care of him and tended to his child’s view, now as an adult he photographs the sisters in the confines of their home and beyond.

There is a tenderness in the images. It’s a tenderness that comes through the togetherness of the sisters. Swati is stronger and more outgoing. She looks after Gayatri at times, but they both find solace in each other’s company, whether it’s reading the newspaper or watching TV. There is also a tenderness in their gesture and touch; the lean of Gayatri’s head on Swati’s shoulders, the linking of hands against the blue-painted wall, the tilt of Swati’s arm on the bannisters on the stairs.

There is also a thoughtfulness in the images that comes from the thoughtfulness in the sisters’ eyes. Swati looks out of a window in her house and you wonder at what she makes of the world beyond, at what that division between the private and the public means to her and her sister. She opens her eyes, she closes her eyes, she performs for her nephew’s camera, but you always feel that the performance is hers, that you are being led into a

world that is her world. And because of this, the images reach outside the frame into a the sisters’ imaginations. It’s a performance, but a performance perhaps of the self they cannot be in the outside world, one where their creative and artistic impulses are given free rein, where their hands, their arms, their bodies glide over the interior in which they are (in part at least) confined.

If the sisters are performing, their stage is the home they live in. It’s a place of damp doorways and curtained windows, where stacks of old papers face blue and green-painted walls. The marks of creativity are everywhere, in fragments of art, in the knitting the sisters sit to pass the time, in the coloured textiles that pile up on the cupboard shelves.

It’s a house from the past, with a roof terrace where the sisters can look out on the world, and it’s a little bit worse for wear. The plaster is falling off the wall in places, the stairs seem rickety, there are cracks in the ceiling, and you can feel the dampness coming out of the darker corners, but at the same time, it’s a space of warmth, it’s a home that is lived in and loved.

That feeling of being lived in, of warmth, of a personal and familial history is also evident in the images. Photography projects can be warm, they can be cold, they can have an emotional intelligence, a kindness, an understanding embedded within them of the rigours, the pains, the humiliations, the defeats, the victories, the celebrations, and the joys of life.

That is what these pictures have. They cut across space and time to the totality of life. They are beautiful, they are creative, they are joyful, but at the same time they are also a little bit sad. Which is what life is. Every time I look at these images, that is what I return to, the spirit and the soul of Swati and Gayatri, two sisters who inhabit one of the most beautiful photo series I have ever seen.

In Kolkata’s Hatibagan area is a two-story house that is a hundred and sixty-three years old. It sits far back from the road, on a piece of land so well insulated that none of the sounds of the city—not the honking of cars nor the cries of the peanut vendors, not even the barking of stray dogs—may enter. It is the ancestral home of Gayatri and Swati Goswami, two elderly sisters who rarely step outside.

The Goswami sisters are albino, with white skin and blond hair, and face a daunting level of scrutiny whenever they venture out in public. Some people point; others taunt, in Bengali, “look, look, a foreigner.” Such behavior has made the sisters reluctant to leave home, save for rare, special visits to another sister’s house, or to the institute where Gayatri studied when she was younger.

The sisters were among the millions of people in India who learned that the country would go into lockdown on March 24, 2020. They were shocked and devastated by the announcement, recalled their nephew, the photographer Debsuddha, who documented the sisters’ experience living under covid restrictions in a series called “Belonging.” The sisters’ small outings had been their only way of breaking the monotony of their life; now their world became smaller still.

The Goswamis’ were middle class, and channelled the hardship of their new life and lesser status into tending to their seven children, giving them every opportunity they could afford. Three of the children, Gayatri, Swati, and another sister, Snigdha, who died in 2018, were born with albinism

All of the children were educated—even the girls—but, despite their parents’ best efforts, life was painful for the albino sisters. During Durga Puja, the most important festival of the Bengali Hindu calendar, when families dress up in new clothes, visit temples, and socialise, some relatives avoided the Goswami house, believing that the sisters’ appearance would negatively impact their social status. When she was in the eighth grade, a group of students pinned Gayatri to the ground and chopped off her curly blond hair. When Swati wanted to train as an actor, she was rejected because the school staff were afraid of how an audience would react upon seeing her. Though fair skin is often revered in Indian culture—particularly in comparison with dark skin—the sisters’ colouring has made them targets for cruelty.

Their mother counselled them not to pay their bullies any heed. Both sisters went on to be highly accomplished—Gayatri has three degrees and speaks five languages, including Sanskrit and Japanese, and Swati has a degree in history and plays violin and guitar—but they continued to be ostracised as adults. Both sisters have struggled to find work, and today they survive on their inheritance. (Their isolated life style accrues few expenses.) Their house, Debsuddha told me, is the safest place for them.

The photographer, who is thirty-one, has become closer with his aunts in recent years. His curiosity about their story is shaped by his own experiences of alienation—he speaks with a stutter, and was bullied by his peers for it. Debsuddha’s first language is Bengali, but even in English he talks forcefully about the indignities his aunts have suffered. “When they fell in love, they had to keep it to themselves,” he said. “They have lived a life of restraint in every way.”

The sisters continue to struggle through the pandemic. In 2018, Gayatri, the older of the two, slipped and injured herself in the bathroom, leaving her almost entirely dependent on Swati. They had always been bound by their condition, but this experience was different. Debsuddha captured this new stage of the sisters’ relationship with a closeup image, in which Swati firmly holds her older sister’s limp white arm at the wrist. Like the other images in “Crossroads,” the picture has a mesmeric quality, the cool tones deliberately chosen to resemble snapshots from a dream.

The palette, Debsuddha said, is meant to capture the surreal seclusion of his aunts’ home. In addition to being unusually quiet, the house is damp and dark, and the sisters use electric tube lights to navigate their way around the heavy furniture. To the photographer, it appears as though the darkness isn’t just in their surroundings—“it is also in their minds.” Artifacts of their early life, such as a high wooden cradle that both aunts and Debsuddha slept in as babies, have been retired to the attic. The gramophone is gone, but there’s still an old TV, an old telephone, and piles of old papers. The paint on the walls is peeling, like skin. Throughout lockdown, other members of the family have kept in touch with one another, but the sisters don’t use the Internet. A rickshaw puller who has known them for decades would come by with groceries. The sisters would pay him and then retreat inside.

When Debsuddha visits Gayatri and Swati, they are joyful, eager to make him tea and to hear the latest gossip. He worries about them when he leaves—at times, he wonders if his aunts feel like they only exist to each other. Yet, through his work, he makes their lives visible. One image shows Swati seated on the terrace. In earlier times, the sisters would walk up together in the late afternoon, when the sun was low in the sky, and gaze out over the city while combing their hair, but Gayatri can no longer climb the stairs. Swati is alone but surrounded by plants, her expression determined, her feet red with alta, a sensual coloured dye usually worn by young or newly married women. Gently, she tilts a watering can.

What role did Swati and Gayatri play in your childhood?

They are my aunts, and I am their nephew, the entire equation of the relationship is full of emotions. Childhood period is the most crucial as well as the most vital period for any child. It psychologically shapes a person’s upcoming life and my aunts played an important part in shaping my childhood and making me the man I am today. In every school vacation, my one and only notion was to visit their place which is called ‘Mamabari’ in Bengali culture; it is the place where I was introduced to Bengali literature, poetry, dance drama, and theatre by my aunts. Every year we used to perform onstage, it was one of the most important things to my aunts, somehow to express themselves in one of the few places where they felt free enough to do so. Gayatri was the main protagonist; she scripted the plays to perform onstage by adapting stories from Bengali and English literature. She was somewhat obsessed with Macbeth, Othello and King Lear. Swati composed and orchestrated the music, songs and mentored me, my brother and sister along with a large group of students for acting in the play and dance drama. They also provided a safe place for me, a place that enable me to have a creative life that helped me transcend my surroundings through their gentle care.

How has albinism affected their lives?

In short, their personal lives have been completely affected by albinism. I can still recall how they used to feel awkward while going out for walk, and even on a vacation trip. Some insecurity has always blocked them from moving forward in all directions except their cultural practice. The discrimination they faced in their childhood, even at a young age, in their school life or from relatives affected them psychologically and somehow had ignited several misunderstandings which cannot be judged in any binary form.

Why did you start the project?

I wanted to find how they bonded as sisters in a relationship of companionship, I wanted to visualise the psychological struggle of my aunts, to seek and understand the melancholy and resilience as well. Along with that I wanted to have my own stand against discrimination, something which has played a key role in creating turmoil in their lives. India where they were born and brought up and have spent their entire life, is a place where people are obsessed with having have white, fairer skin. It is seen as the ‘parameter of beauty for women’ but even a small difference within a social group can lead to discrimination that can socially and psychologically destroy somebody’s life.

Tell me about the house they live in? It seems to play a major role in the project?

The house is the safe zone of Swati and Gayatri. It is 163 years old so was built in 1858. It’s a two storey house which is located in the Hatibagan area of North Kolkata. It is the place where they born and brought up and have spent their entire life. I spent a large part of my childhood growing up there. It is the place where the full range of emotions regarding this project are located. The architecture of the house completely resembles with typical north Kolkata heritage buildings. The house plays a vital metaphorical role in showcasing their isolation, claustrophobia, and solitary condition.

There is a very performative element to the book. I’m interested to know how Swati and Gayatri were involved?

In some images, the moments were captured suddenly without any preconceived preparation. Then there are some that were staged after discussing my project ideas with Swati and Gayatri. In this project in terms of research my entire lifetime has been the research period as I am have been observing them since my childhood days. That has helped me to stage several scenes with my preconceived thoughts to evoke their psychological struggles, dreams, and desires metaphorically. When

I’m there, we chat and remember the old days when I was a child and we used to perform plays and dance dramas under their guidance, so there is enjoyment and pleasure present. Being their nephew means nothing has obstructed us from sharing personal things, there are no barriers so it has never been a problem for them to perform these things. Swati, my younger aunt, is so smart that I don’t even struggle to make her understand what I want to capture by staging and why I am doing so, she reads my mind somehow. So their involvement is very much organic.

What do you want people to think or feel from this project?

I do not want to make people to think or feel the way I have felt. I want to keep this space open to every audience. It will be interesting when the audience can connect with it with their own connections.

What do you hope to do with the project?

Being a photographer, all I hope for is the project to commemorate the resilience of my aunts.

The Goswamis’ milky skin and blonde, feathery hair have rendered them victims of lifelong bullying and segregation. Debsuddha’s poetic images exhibit little of his photojournalistic beginnings. The Kolkata-born photographer initially studied engineering but abandoned the profession in 2011 after one year of working. “I was trying to fulfil my family’s wishes,” he reflects. “So I just quit and started to teach myself photography.” 

Three years later, Debsuddha was freelancing for several news agencies. However, he gradually became disillusioned with news photography’s onus on the individual image, ready once again to do something different. He embarked on a succession of personal series, which have brought him to where he is as an artist today. It’s a place that, he stresses, is constantly evolving: “With every project, I feel my style changing.”

In 2017, Debsuddha quit freelancing and dedicated himself to creating long-term documentary series, conceiving his project, Towards the No Man’s Land They Say, which is ongoing. The series of melancholic black-and-white images centres on the Indian portion of the Sundarbans delta – a cluster of low-lying islands in the Bay of Bengal filled with tangled mangrove forests. Over the last 20 years, the sea level in the delta has risen dramatically by around 3cm each year – a much faster rate than the global average. The effects have been devastating: shrinking land masses forcing communities to uproot their lives. 

The project is still evolving, but a focus on the psychological effects of displacement sits at the heart of the work. As Debsuddha articulates: “As communities flee for economic and environmental reasons, the effect on their identity is profound.”

However, Debsuddha’s next project, Crossroads, which is also ongoing, was the photographer’s real turning point. “It changed my perception and allowed me to develop my style,” he reflects. The images are mesmerising: quietly framing the isolated lives of Debsuddha’s two elderly aunts, Gayatri and Swati Goswami. The Goswamis’ are albino – their milky skin and blonde, feathery hair have rendered them victims of lifelong bullying and segregation. The pair inhabit a lofty two-storey house, 164 years old and set back from a road in Kolkata’s Hatibagan neighbourhood, from which they rarely venture. 

In 2020, following the advent of Covid-19 and a mentor’s encouragement, Debsuddha began photographing the Goswamis’ at home, gently picturing their isolated lives (which were rendered even more so by the pandemic) through pensive, almost whimsical, colour images. “My aunties are shy,” says Debsuddha, “but in time they started opening up to me and the more I understood their stories, the more the work grew.”

“The pandemic has brought the value of human relationships to the forefront of the public conscience,” says Delhi-based photo editor, curator and writer Tanvi Mishra. Mishra nominated Debsuddha, as did British photographer Martin Parr CBE, and editor-in-chief of Magnum Photos, Simon Bainbridge, who guest-edited this issue. 

“Debsuddha’s project expands from this present moment, speaking about isolation not as a symptom of contemporary life but as a human condition,” continues Mishra. “The story has the potential to connect with many that have felt this distance from the world. However, the work does not locate itself in trauma. Instead, it provides an intimate view of the solace of sisterhood and the fragility of old age.”

Debsuddha had also conceptualised another project before the pandemic hit; one in which he would collaborate with his father. However, Covid-19 put this on hold and tragically took his father’s life last year. “I started working with him directly when he was alive, but lockdown prevented me from continuing,” Debsuddha explains. 

“Finally, I have returned to the series, which has become a monologue with my deceased dad.” The series is far from finished, but the photographer hopes to have made some progress

by the end of the year. As with all of his work, the process is ongoing with no clear endpoint. It’s an approach that echoes the fluidity of Debsuddha’s development as an artist: his reflective nature and openness to experimentation enabling him to create distinct, considered work replete with feeling and emotions. 

Despite the crumbling pastel-painted walls, there’s a sense of faded grandeur to the 164-year-old house where Gayatri and Swati Goswami have lived two lifetimes together. It’s where they were born and raised in the heart of Kolkata in the decades following India’s independence, and it’s where they still call home.

The house, which dates back to the inception of British Imperial rule, has increasingly become a sanctuary for the two unmarried sisters, both born with albinism, several years apart; a protection from the prejudice and cruelty of the outside world. It also provides the solitary backdrop for Crossroads, Debsuddha’s photographic series on the sisters, if only because this inner sanctum, their world becoming ever smaller during the pandemic.

The house, however, is merely the stage. For Debsuddha - who uses only his first name professionally and on his website - the main focus is on the remarkable bond between the sisters; their melancholy and their resilience, their mutual reliance and the support they provide each other. In a number of ways, it’s a portrait of an interior world, photographed by someone who clearly has a more than passing empathy for the women. Because such tender images could surely only have been captured by someone close to them. Indeed, Debsuddha knows the sisters and their house intimately. “Almost every vacation, whether it was summer or winter, we would visit them ans stay there for few days or few weeks,’’ he explains, recalling his childhood with his aunts.

The sisters, who are highly educated, possessing four degrees between them, weren’t so isolated back then, running a school for music and dance, and putting on a performance once a year with their students. Gayatri scripted plays adapted from English and Bengali literature, and was particularly fond of Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, while Swati composed music and songs.

In those days, the house was also a sanctuary for Debsuddha, a safe place where he could indulge his imagination and his creative instincts. Gradually, as the sisters got older, the enmity they faced from the outside world took its toll. “The psychological constraints forced them to seek a sanctuary where they can find some peace,’’ he says.

His own mother had lived there until she married and moved to Dum Dum, close to Kolkata’s international airport, where she and Debsuddha and his sister still reside.

While the aunts’ house in the Hatibagan neighbourhood - close to the city’s oldest market, surrounded by theatre halls and cinemas - remains something of a time capsule, much has changed around Dum Dum, with the arrival of dozens of new apartment blocks.

It’s from here that Debsuddha reaches me via video link. It is just a few weeks after he was named the RPS Documentary Photographer of the Year 2021 for Crossroads. The video call offers a small window into his life 5,000 miles away - behind him is a wall covered in photographs, small prints from his on-going project.

“The reason is nothing else other than I just want to see these photos all the time,” he explains. “I want to live with them. So, from when I wake up to when I go to bed, I see these photos constantly.”

Debsuddha never imagined becoming a photographer. He wanted to go to art college after school, but his parents couldn’t - wouldn’t support his aspirations, and pushed him towards engineering instead. “I completely removed my mind from this dream because I was so angry,” he says. “I did not want to do engineering - they just chose it.”

That proved pivotal to his self-development. Over the next few years he began attending workshops, applying for - and winner - scholarships, and learning directly from photojournalists such as Abir Abdullah, Smita Sharma, Kosuke Okahara, Veejay Villafranca, and Christopher Morris. It was the latter who set a visual storytelling brief that led to Crossroads, asking the mentees of the VII Academy programme he was teaching to complete a month-long assignment. Faced with the Covid restriction that locked down 1.3 billion Indians in the spring of 2020, Debsuddha’s thoughts turned to his aunts.

“That time pushed me to think about them, because we had never experienced before what is isolation,” he says. “So, when we started to face it, we got to understand that it is mainly a psychological problem. The pandemic forced me to think about them because their entire life has been in social isolation. They understand it far better than us.”

He began photographing his aunts, working intimately with them. It was the first time he had worked this way, but he was clear in his intentions. “I wanted to convey their hope, their sadness, their bond, the dreams they still have,” Debsuddha says. He was experimenting, trying different approaches, photographing them together, capturing gestural movements, photographing them around the confines of the house, and incorporating the marvellous images of them in younger life that he found in photo albums.

A few months later he was awarded a place on the seven-month-long CATALYST mentor programme run by IC Visual Cabin collaboration with Bristol Photo Festival.

“Debsuddha is a committed photographer, engaged primarily on a personal level with his aunts,” says writer and photographer Colin Pantall, who was one of the his mentors. “There is an understanding and an empathy with their lives,, with the house where they lived, their creativity their emotional lives, which he is working to express photographically, but which also comes from his absolute direct experience of having being cared for by them when he was younger.”

Debsuddha had previously worked for a couple of years on his first major project, Towards the no man’s land , shot in the Sundarbans delta, which focuses on climate migration. Crossroads is an altogether different subject, one that took him some time to conceptualise. “To be honest I didn’t have the maturity to work on a very personal story before,” he admits. He cites the influence of another Indian photographer; someone who has been a huge influence on the merging generation. “When I was starting this journey, I had no idea that you could make a series in your own home, on your mom or dad. There are still so many photographers here that are ashamed or don’t want to express the story of their close ones. But when I saw and read about Sohrab Hura’s work on his mother, it pushed me to believe that I also have a perspective that I can express.”

Debsuddha is now working on a third series, Departure, addressing the death of his father during the second wave of Covid. And having spent more than a year focusing on the sisters’ “psychological claustrophobia”, he wants to take a trip with them, away from the confines of the house. “When I talked with my aunts about my intentions, I got to know one thing - they love the beach.” When he quizzed them further, they revealed something rather poetic about this longing. “They can shout out to the sea, and the sea will hear all their stories. They can talk loudly, yet keep their privacy. They can tell the sea all their dreams.”