Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble
Self-published, Marigold Books
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It was 1986. I had arrived in California to pursue a bachelor’s degree in engineering. From then till 2013, when I finally moved back to India, I photographed as much as I could afford to. Now I have ten trunks which are full of negatives to show for it. This book derives itself from the first few years of photographs from this personal archive.
The idea of documenting my friends and our experiences was instinctive, like an urgent need to satisfy a desire. This became a sort of collaboration—an intimate performance. This tale of youth is anchored on relationships with the people who accompanied me as friends and lovers. This community of friends has evolved, from old to new and newer even, and throughout the adventures, some of which were turbulent, we've remained friends—even after thirty years.
-Srinivas Kuruganti
In our desire to hold on to our pasts, photography has served as an amenable conduit. The photo album, besides its place as a family heirloom, has often lent itself outside the personal, to offer broader insights about communities, historical periods and relational ways of being. Most family albums are filled with moments that compel being captured—the birth of the first child in the home, the graduation ceremony, the first trip abroad or a homecoming. In the careful crafting of the archive, the occasion is preserved, and the narrative is set. But what of the residue in these archives? Whose story do they tell? Focusing beyond the decisive moment, the surplus becomes a record of the everyday, the life lived between the ceremonies and the celebrations. With time, as though pickled in a jar, the mundane accumulates a complexity, an acquired taste and flavours richer than its raw form.
Reading Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble is like picking the jar off the shelf. Time has marinated the images in the meanwhile, turning them into motifs of youth in early 1990s West Coast America. Excavating memories to weave them into narratives of his own making, Srinivas Kuruganti reflects on his early years in America, which were held together by kinship and community. Unlike the popular narratives of South Asian diasporic life in the US that are often rooted within metrics of achievement and aspirations of the immigrant experience, Pictures in My Hand… reads like episodic recollections of intimate friendship, young love and the intrepid cocoon of one’s early twenties. Its buoyant tenor prompts us to question how we may wish to remember, and archive, a period in our youth that felt simpler, and more free. The book rests in that liminal space before the weight of adulthood, and responsibility, breaks the threshold.
The work is untouched by the premeditations that guide a photographic ‘project’. Instead, it emerges in the book-building process, through the retrospective impulse of evoking a time, long past in reality but fresh as yesterday in the author’s mind. As in the family album, Pictures in My Hand… presents a carefully crafted selection of a lived experience, distilled over thirty years of memories. There is no spectacle here, no moment more important than the other, but a journey of a young man as he navigates the terrain of a land that is not his own, and his own place within it.
-Tanvi Mishra Curator/ Writer
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Book Specifications
192 pages
8.6 x 6.5 inches
English
Publication date: June 2024
Gatefold cover
ISBN: 978-93-340-6465-0
Editions
400 copies of the regular edition priced at INR 2,500 27 copies of the special edition including a signed copy and a 8.5 x 5.5 inch selenium-toned silver gelatin fiber print priced at INR 10,000
*All books will be numbered.
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