“When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.” – Robert Frank
From Twitter to TV, Facebook to Flickr, Instagram and more, images surround us everywhere we go, rushing by us day by day, moment by moment. But some photos make us want to take another look. Here are seven exceptional photographers whose work has graced the pages of The Aerogram. Savor the images they’ve captured before you head into the post-Thanksgiving end-of-year frenzy.
1. Sanaa Hamid: Reinterpreting the Self Portrait Through Her Eyes
Sanaa Hamid is a photographer from England. She often works within the theme of social politics, particularly matters of multiculturalism, cultural and religious identity, gender identity and the battleground of body politics, particularly within an Islamic and South Asian context. “Through Her Eyes” is a series of performative self portraits, using the aesthetic style of the Bollywood films and Pakistani actresses that her mother admired when she was her age.
2. Preston Merchant: A Visit to Canada’s Blueberry Capital
Preston Merchant is working on Indiaworld, a photography book about the global Indian diaspora. He divides his time between New York and the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. In this photo essay, Merchant looks at Abbotsford, Canada’s blueberry capital which is also home to the country’s oldest gurdwara and an agricultural industry dominated by Sikhs. Sikh women form the core of the blueberry-picking labor force in the Fraser Valley.
3. Vikram Zutshi on the Subaltern Backbone of Mumbai
Vikram Zutshi is a filmmaker, writer and photographer based in Los Angeles. His photo essay Working Class Hero is about the people that make Mumbai throb and hum; street vendors, cab drivers, rickshaw-wallahs, massage-wallahs, police constables, astrologers, train commuters, itinerants. For more of his black and white photography, see his work Malabar Diary exploring the beauty of India’s west coast.
4. Nushmia Khan: Lahori Christians Living Under the Radar
Nushmia Khan is a video and photojournalist based out of Chicago. She has had a range of experience through working for newspapers, such as the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, political campaigns and a documentary film company. After gaining an opportunity to visit a church while in Pakistan, she shared her photos to raise awareness of Pakistani Christians. For more of her work see A Minute of the Hands in Pakistan and Time in Lahore.
5. Priyanka Sacheti: Notes on Photographing Walls in Rajasthan
Priyanka Sacheti is an independent cultural writer living in Pittsburgh. When she’s not busy working on a collection of short stories or Instagramming, she blogs at I Am Just a Visual Person and Photo Kahanis. For her, walls are like mirrors which reflect the outside to show the inside, with surfaces that become alive and dynamic.
6. Mirra Fine and Daniel Klein: The Perennial Plate Visits Sri Lanka
Chef Daniel Klein and co-producer/filmmaker Mirra Fine are the creators of The Perennial Plate, a weekly online documentary series that tells the stories of food and the people who make it, with a focus on socially responsible and adventurous eating. They visited Sri Lanka as part of their world tour and their photos and video show the foods of the country and the people and families whose work goes into producing them.
7. Abeer Hoque: The Long Way Home
Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi-American writer and photographer. The Long Way Home is her book of travel photographs and poems, and its introduction is reprinted on The Aerogram. One of the reasons she loves photography is “it doesn’t matter where you’re from, only where you are and how you see it.”
Pavani Yalamanchili is a co-founder of The Aerogram. Email her at editors@theaerogram.com. Find The Aerogram on Twitter @theaerogram or on Facebook.
