Soumya Sankar Bose

Soumya Sankar Bose is an Indian documentary photographer. In his practice he uses photography, archival material, text and film to explore desire, identity and memory.[5] 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.[6] The Book was shortlisted for the First Photobook award in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2020.

Soumya Sankar Bose
Born1990
Midnapore, India
OccupationPhotographer
Years active2010-present
Known forPortrait,Documentary photography
Notable work
  • The Former Heroes of Jatra[1]
  • Full Moon On a Dark night[2]
Awards
  • Magnum Foundation's Migration and Religion Grant [3]
  • India Foundation For the Arts Grant 2015 & 17[4]
Websitewww.soumyasankarbose.in

Life and work

Soumya Sankar Bose is an independent documentary photographer,[7] born and brought up in Midnapore, West Bengal India. His long term project on retired Jatra (Bengal)[8] artistes had been funded by India Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared in The New York Times,[9]The Caravan,[10] The Huffington Post, BBC,[11] The Indian Express,[12]The Telegraph,[13]NPR[14] and many more .

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.[15]

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.[16]

Awards & 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 & Relegion grant.[17]
  • 2017- Magnum Foundation’s Photography and Social Justice Fellowship.[18]
  • 2015 & 17- India foundation for the Arts grant under the Arts Practice Programme.
  • 2015- The Toto Emerging Photographer of the Year.

References
  1. "The Caravan 2015".
  2. "The New York Times".
  3. "Magnum Foundation".
  4. "India Foundation For the Arts Grant".
  5. "Goa Photo Festival 2015".
  6. "Where The Birds Never Sing".
  7. "Best Of Photography".
  8. "Medium/Vantage 2015".
  9. "The New York Times 2018".
  10. "The Caravan 2018".
  11. "BBC".
  12. "The Indian Express".
  13. "The Telegraph".
  14. "National Public Radio".
  15. "Tasveer Journal 2015".
  16. "The Caravan 2018".
  17. "Where the Birds never sing".
  18. "Legends of a lost art". Tribuneindia News Service.
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