HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Soumya Sankar Bose is an Indian documentary photographer. In his practice he uses photography, archival material and text to explore desire, identity and memory. His first book 'Where the Birds Never Sing(2020)' is on Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of lower caste Bengali refugees on Marichjhapi Island in Sundarban, India, and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease. The Book was shortlisted for the First Photobook award in the
Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards The Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards is a yearly photography book award that is given jointly by Paris Photo and Aperture Foundation. It is announced at the Paris Photo fair and was established in 2012. The categories are First P ...
2020.


Life and work

Soumya Sankar Bose is an independent documentary photographer, born and brought up in Midnapore, West Bengal India. His long-term project on retired
Jatra (Bengal) Jatra ( bn, যাত্রা, or, ଯାତ୍ରା, ) is a popular folk-theatre form of Odia theatre, Bengali theatre, spread throughout most of Odia, Bengali speaking areas of the Indian subcontinent, including Bangladesh and Indian state ...
artistes had been funded by
India Foundation for the Arts India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is a national, non-profit, the grantmaking organisation that supports the practice, research and education in the arts in India. Established as a public trust in 1993, IFA is headquartered in Bangalore. Its fo ...
. His work has reviewed by ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
,'' ''
The Caravan ''The Caravan'' is an Indian English-language, long-form narrative journalism magazine covering politics and culture. History In 1940, Vishwa Nath launched ''Caravan'' as the first magazine from the Delhi Press; it went on to establish its ...
,'' ''
The Huffington Post ''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...
,''
BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
, ''
The Indian Express ''The Indian Express'' is an English-language Indian daily newspaper founded in 1932. It is published in Mumbai by the Indian Express Group. In 1999, eight years after the group's founder Ramnath Goenka's death in 1991, the group was split betw ...
,'' ''
The Telegraph ''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include: Australia * ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...
,'' ''
NPR National Public Radio (NPR, stylized in all lowercase) is an American privately and state funded nonprofit media organization headquartered in Washington, D.C., with its NPR West headquarters in Culver City, California. It differs from other ...
'' and many more. Bose has worked on commission for clients including
Le Monde ''Le Monde'' (; ) is a French daily afternoon newspaper. It is the main publication of Le Monde Group and reported an average circulation of 323,039 copies per issue in 2009, about 40,000 of which were sold abroad. It has had its own website si ...
, HSBC Bank, Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine, Financial Times, The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Acumen, The Wall Street Journal etc. Bose's work "Let's Sing an Old Song" explores concepts of nostalgia, modernity, performativity and the transformation of art in a changing world, his work both creates and documents reality. His portraits of Jatra artists are staged spectacles that evoke not only the tragedy of this waning tradition, but also those of its practitioners. Using photography as a performative medium rather than documentary tool, Bose brings an original approach to an often photographically explored space of dying art form in India. Immersing the viewer in a surreal universe is crucial to Bose's project "Full moon on a Dark Night." By way of those portraits, Bose conducts a psychological exploration of a community of individuals who have been relentlessly persecuted by society because of their identities and their gender or sexual orientations. The work looks closely at the LGBT community in eastern India through a fantastical lens, often projecting a world devoid of restrictive laws and social taboos that the community regularly comes up against. Other images in the work are responses to these very constraints imposed by the state and society. It is here that Bose makes use of visual metaphors—a gas mask, a tiger in the wild, a choppy sea engulfing a man struggling against the current—to evoke notions of censorship and surveillance and feelings of suffocation and anxiety. Soumya Sankar Bose’s project Where The Birds Never Sing (2017-2020) brought together Bose’s long-term project on the Marichjhapi massacre, the forcible eviction in 1979 of Bengali lower caste refugees from the Marichjhapi Island in Sundarbans, West Bengal, India and the subsequent death of thousands by police gunfire, starvation, and disease. Experimenter Outpost takes this project back to Kumirmari, Sundarbans, near the Marichjhapi island through a series of enlarged reproductions of Bose’s images that mark the landscape. The images become sentinels, standing as silent witnesses of unspeakable atrocities committed over forty years ago, on a land that whispered into Bose’s ears incredible stories of loss, memory and the complex political history it represents.


Publications

*''Where the Birds Never Sing'' Kolkata: self-published (Red Turtle Photobook), 2020. . Edition of 600 copies. *''Let's sing an old song'' Kolkata: self-published (Red Turtle Photobook), 2021. . Edition of 500 copies.


Awards and fellowships

* 2020- The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art's Amol Vadehra Art Grant. * 2020- The Agroecology Fund in collaboration with Magnum Foundation. * 2019- Goethe-Insitut / Max Mueller Bhavan's Five Million Incidents. * 2019- World Press Photo's Joop Swart Masterclass. * 2019- India foundation for the Arts' Photo Book grant. * 2018- Magnum Foundation & Henry Luce Foundation's Migration & Religion grant. * 2017- Magnum Foundation's Photography and Social Justice Fellowship. * 2015 & 17- India foundation for the Arts grant under the Arts Practice Programme. * 2015- The Toto Emerging Photographer of the Year.


References


External links

*
Interview NPR
June, 2019 {{DEFAULTSORT:Bose, Soumya Sankar People from Midnapore Living people 1990 births Indian portrait photographers Documentary photographers 21st-century Indian photographers Bengali male artists Bengali Hindus Indian contemporary artists 21st-century Bengalis Photographers from West Bengal