About the Actant
© Srinivas Kuruganti
Srinivas Kuruganti is a photographer currently based out of Mumbai, who has lived and worked in California, New York and London. His work focuses on environmental issues, ranging from ship-breaking to coal mining. In 2001, he worked on a long-term photo essay on the AIDS epidemic in India. Over the last few years, he has been archiving his photographs of 30 years of travels in India, America, and Europe. He is currently working on two photo books based on this archive – one on mining in Central India, and the other on the 16 years spent in New York City. Some of the photos from his time in New York were shown in a group show, The Surface of Things, at the Alliance Francaise in New Delhi in 2016. A large collection of photographs taken by him in England spanning eleven years of friendships, community, and family were exhibited at PhotoUkIndia in 2015 at The British Council in Delhi. He was the Photo Editor at The Caravan magazine, India’s foremost magazine for long-form journalism, on politics and culture (2013-2017).
© Srinivas Kuruganti
Srinivas has been a photographer for over 30 years, since 1989 – moving from Delhi to California to pursue a degree and began to record my experiences from then on. He did this every time he moved, subsequently spending sixteen years in New York. It was there that he became immensely involved in the city, documenting social gatherings of all kinds – protests, nightlife, the Bhangra and Drum n Bass scene run by South Asians there… pictures of his friends, of himself, of events that he went to and the streets that he walked. In the following years he struggled to move with eight trunks filled with negatives, contact sheets and prints – from city to city – and only recently has he started to scan, digitise and catalogue this material. Looking at these pictures now, many of which he doesn’t remember taking, he sees a life lived constantly on the move. With this project, he would like the viewers to understand the work involved in creating and archiving something that has been sitting dormant for years.
