Debmalya Ray Choudhuri

Photographer

Deb Choudhuri is a photographer and writer from India, currently based in New York. Deb deals with the “queerness” of desire, love, body, and space through personal narratives. To Deb, photography acts as an interface with the world, a way to confront it, a way to desire and define one’s own position. Deb’s practice has its roots in the need to take distance from the chaos of the surroundings, and get intimate, physically and emotionally, in places where the hunt is more lyrical, delicate, sometimes strong. Over time, the creative practice has naturally flowed from finding a sense of belonging in one place, to connecting to people by establishing closeness to one person, at a time. This way, the author tries to understand the way people express desire and love and uses photography to converse with them. They use these experiences, and conversations with strangers and friends to build the complex play of what it means to be here, to understand every struggle, and to live in a broader sociopolitical realm of existence. The lines between the subject and the photographer are fluid in the work. These dual conversations open new perspectives on the relationship between the self and the other. Currently, Deb works on long-term collaborative projects that engage an interdisciplinary approach towards image-making, engaging photography, performance, and text.