About the Actant
© Abhishek Basu
Born in Tatanagar, India, Abhishek Basu's objective with photography is to explore the human condition. His intent is to record and portray immediate and momentary impulses he feels as a result of situations that unfold around him – from comprehending his anxieties, to bridging social barriers. This is the main topic of discussion in Passion Fruit, an ongoing book project, for which he received a scholarship from Burn Magazine in 2017 to attend a workshop in Puerto Rico with Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey. A freelance photographer, Abhishek has worked with various publishing/news houses such as The Wire and Himal Magazine, on experimental story telling techniques, book design, curation and multimedia.
© Abhishek Basu
Provoke Papers is a quarterly newspaper dedicated to long-form photo journalism. Going beyond just capturing the 'decisive moment' it aims to link such moments/events captured by photo-journalists but hidden away due to lack of support. The paper will focus on a single theme per issue, with the intention of creating a wholistic picture, occupying the unchartered liminal space between the hyper-local and the macro. Working in collaboration with local writers, cartoonists and photographers, the first issue of Provoke Papers will focus on the broad theme of ‘Migration’. The newspaper will be pinned on the community reading boards in Kolkata, where a community reading phenomena quite unique to the city, provides passersby with food for thought/ reflection along with their opinion-full ‘chais’. Themes for successive issues of the newspaper will draw on the discussion/ feedback that will ensue in these public reading spaces. In this way, production and dissemination process is truly democratised – of, for and by the people who are both writing as well as reading it.
