Four South Asian photographers redefine beauty, identity, and memory through deeply personal and emotionally resonant imagery

In an evolving visual landscape, four South Asian photographers—Avani Rai, Bikramjit Bose, Rid Burman, and Simrah Farrukh—offer distinct ways of seeing. Their work spans continents and generations, 
shaped by legacy, instinct, and a shared resistance to the spectacle of perfection. Whether capturing intimacy in stillness, energy in chaos, or identity in flux, each photographer reclaims beauty on their own terms. Together, they sketch a powerful, plural portrait of contemporary South Asian image-making—
one that refuses singular narratives, and instead invites us to pause, reflect, and truly see.

Avani Rai

For Avani Rai, photography was never a pursuit—it was an instinct. Received her first camera as a gift when she was a child, Rai began capturing fragments of life long before she considered the act an art form. The daughter of acclaimed photographer Raghu Rai, she was surrounded by images and image makers, yet her journey was not one of emulation, but introspection. “I simply photographed anything I wanted to make tangible, anything I wanted to take home with me as a piece of life,” she reflects.

What began as casual filming of her father in Delhi eventually became a deeply personal documentary—a five year odyssey that also nurtured her evolution as a still photographer. Without formal training, her craft was honed through observation, instinct, and an unrelenting need to preserve fleeting moments. Despite entering a male-dominated space, Rai’s challenges were less about gender and more about identity. “To find a true vision, I first needed to understand who I was,” she says. Her inheritance came not just with legacy, but with the weight of expectation— to find her own visual language in a world already saturated with strong voices. “The only way to discover it was to pick up the camera and take the photograph.”

Her aesthetic—rich, grainy textures, and evocative tones—resists categorisation. She treats each frame as an emotional imprint, defined not by signature style, but by the truth of the moment. For Rai, beauty is not aesthetic perfection, but an honest reflection of life. “It is intensity. It is longing. It is the experience itself,” she says. Whether working on a commercial brief or a personal photo-essay, she returns to one constant: The photograph taken for no one but herself.

Bikramjit Bose

In an age of visual excess, Bikramjit Bose offers a pause—his images, quiet meditations that linger long after the shutter clicks. Raised in Kolkata and creatively inclined, Bose stumbled into photography while  preparing a design school portfolio. Armed with his grandfather’s Minolta, he taught himself the fundamentals and, with the intuitive eye of the self-taught, discovered an enduring language of light and shadow. Relocating to Mumbai in 2008, his career unfurled not in a meteoric rise, but with slow, glacial grace. He walked the city’s magazine corridors, a physical portfolio in hand, driven more by instinct than ambition. A portrait here, a fashion story there—over time, a body of work emerged: Stark, sincere, luminously restrained. 

Bose’s images are less about spectacle, more about stillness. Often working with natural light and minimal equipment, he strips photography down to its emotional core. His famed portrait of Jhumpa Lahiri at the India Coffee House in Kolkata—serene amid a swirl of movement—is a testament to this poetic minimalism. “Photography speaks to me from a quiet place,” he says. “I set the mood, then allow the person to bring themselves into the frame.” His aesthetic, once anchored in black and white, has matured into something broader, yet still deeply personal. Bose’s images emerge from memory, emotion, and the 
quiet energy of his subjects. “I’m drawn to people who possess a quietude,” he says. “Their faces speak a language I understand.” Influenced early by Prabuddha Dasgupta, Avedon, and Lindbergh, he now trusts the rhythms of his own vision. Whether shooting fashion campaigns or portraits of children with cancer, he 
resists the urge to label beauty. For him, it’s an energy—something you feel before you see.

 

Rid Burman

There is a certain kind of alchemy that occurs in a marketplace—the feverish hum of exchange, the undulating movement of fabric and fruit, the flickering dance of sunlight through gaps in makeshift canopies. For Rid Burman, the bazaar is not just a place but a state of being—an ever-shifting tableau of colour, form, and energy. “You’ll never reach the other end,” he muses, lost in a moment, the image burning into his mind like a latent photograph waiting to be developed.

It is this restless, insatiable gaze that defines Burman’s photography. His work is an exploration—a search for beauty in its most unexpected forms. Born into an artistic lineage—his parents, renowned painters Paresh Maity and Jayshree Burman—he was steeped in the language of fine art long before he picked up a camera. His first love was sculpture. But photography, with its paradoxical mix of immediacy and eternity, called to him in ways he couldn’t yet articulate. “A photograph is just a fraction of a second, but it can live 
forever,” he reflects.

Trained at Brooks Institute in California and later mentored by photographers Bruce Weber and Steven Klein, Burman spent five years in the US before returning to India—only to find a landscape unprepared for his vision. The industry, entrenched in a grand, theatrical aesthetic, resisted his preference for natural light and kinetic frames. “Everything was glossy, over-stylised. I wanted to strip that away, to capture something more honest,” he explains. His subjects were no longer posing; they lingered amidst shadows and grain, exuding a quiet, compelling beauty. To Burman, beauty is not perfection—it is kindness. “The most beautiful people I’ve photographed are the ones who make you feel at ease,” he says. It is also, perhaps, the electric chaos of a market, where a heap of red melons becomes a meditation on colour, where the very act of looking transforms the mundane into the magnificent. 

Simrah Farrukh

Beauty, for Simrah Farrukh, is an ever-shifting entity—an amalgamation of memory, culture, and identity. “If someone has a beautiful character, they literally radiate and it’s unexplainable. On set, when there’s this sense of peace and calm—the sun shining on your face and life feels great,” says the Bay Area-based photographer. As a South Asian diasporic image-maker, Farrukh’s work thrives at the intersection of heritage and contemporary femininity, crafting imagery that challenges and redefines the traditional gaze.

Navigating the industry as a female photographer, particularly one rooted in diasporic identity, has been a nuanced journey. Sustainability is a theme close to her heart. “It’s purposeful and intentional,” she says. It’s a space she entered through her best friend Aditi Mayer, and credits her work with independent, designer-led sustainable brands as some of the most nourishing ones she’s done as a creative.

A stirring intimacy—of gaze and space—pierces her work. Farrukh claims this as an artistic inheritance from Amrita Sher-Gil, a painter she discovered in college and immediately fell in love with. Like Sher-Gil, she reveres the many women she photographs, aware of the cultural expectations shaping their self-perception. She recalls a college project on colourism and South Asian women’s noses: “I took side portraits of 14 women and put them into a 16-grid collage on Instagram.” After including her own and leaving the last square blank, the piece went viral. “I started getting dozens of messages from women putting their own selfies in that space. It became interactive, impacting so 
many lives.”

At a time when legacy fashion houses scramble for identity through constant creative director changes, South Asian creatives stand at a curious crossroad. Having grown up in America, Farrukh forged her own visual language. “I’d look through my mom’s closet and use textiles as backdrops. But is there truly a South Asian colour palette?” She asks. In an age of curated heritage, Farrukh urges us to pause. Step outside. Look at sunlight on leaves. At heirloom textiles draped for decades. “Think outside the digital space in order to create work that can be shared within it,” she says, eyes glistening with a future nearly within reach.

Lead image: Courtesy of all photographers

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