Pictures in My Hand of A Boy I Still Resemble
Excerpts from a Photo Book by Srinivas Kuruganti
Srinivas Kuruganti is a photographer currently based in Delhi, who has lived and worked in New York and London. His work tackles environmental and health issues, personal essays and much more. Between 2013 and 2017, he was the photo editor at The Caravan magazine, and has had several publications, exhibitions and lectures across continents. In recent years, he has been archiving his photographs of three decades, which document his life and travels in India, America and Europe.
“It was 1986, I had arrived in California with straight cropped hair and a moustache to pursue a Bachelor’s in engineering. When I got to the dorms and looked around, I knew I stood out.”
Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble is a deeply personal project that Hammock has had the privilege of publishing a selection from. The project is a collection of photos from 1986 onwards that loosely chronicle Kuruganti’s journey as an Indian student in California.
Reading Pictures in My Hand of a Boy I Still Resemble is like entering a time capsule, a peek into youth and coming of age in early 1990s West Coast America. Kuruganti’s images are drenched with nostalgia, intimacy and honesty, guided by the personal rather than the universal, and bringing into focus the cocoon of student life, young love, and immigration in a manner that is personal and groundbreaking.
In a time before the internet and a time when the narrative around immigration was centered around metrics of achievement and aspiration, this photo collection is, in the words of Kuruganti, “tale of youth anchored on relationships with the people who accompanied me as friends and lovers”. According to curator and writer Tanvi Mishra, 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.”
A distillation of many years of memories, of a simpler and much different time, and of a life that has been lived against the grain, Kuruganti’s images chronicle a series of friendships and the blurry, loose youth that most Indian students today might not always experience. He dropped out of his engineering degree and built a stellar career in photography on the back of the freedom and kinship that this environment offered him. With nearly three decades having passed since that time, the photos are now an intimate chronicle of friendships and memories that have faded with time or distance but remained a formative part of an artist’s journey.
These photos are excerpted from the full photo book, Pictures in My Hand of A Boy I Still Resemble. The book is forthcoming and can be purchased at this link, where you can also explore more of Srinivas’ work.