Namrita Bachchan

Namrita Bachchan

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Namrita Bachchan (b. 1976, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India) was educated in Switzerland and the UK before pursuing a BFA in Painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (1999). Followed by an AAS degree in Graphic Design at the Parsons School of Design, New York (2003) and a course on Botanical Drawing at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (2018).

She has worked as a freelance graphic-designer and photographer since returning to India in 2005, as well as publishing two books of illustrated poetry, Deliverance (2007) and The House Of Wine (2010). She has exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, London, and was recently included in a Tate Lates Contemporary Surrealist Photography event (2020).

The Shortest Distance Between Two People Is Love – a set of 8 photographs was neither conceived nor shot as a series but has been edited to form one, underscoring its relevance to the current climate of isolation and social retreat, wherein so many souls worldwide are separated from the ones they love. Ranging in context from the Chhat Puja, Gateway of India, and the banks of the Yamuna outside New Delhi, the images capture transient, unstaged, unspoken moments between couples, with emphasis on emotional atmosphere, as read through composition and body language. Scission here a gulf of water, there barely a sliver of light. The images seek to capture the progressive moods of romantic intimacy as it moves sensually and spiritually from the indivisible to the estranged, and back. The series, both stylistically and narratively, explores the notion of communion existing in a space beyond the physical, a space beguiling and evanescent during times unforeseeable, and as such finds its unifying thread in the closing lines of a poem by Palestinian poet Hala Alyan “I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. I’m here to tell you that whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful.”

Namrita currently lives and works in New Delhi, India.