Anu Kumar was barely 8 months old when, in 1990, her parents left their native India with her to settle in Melbourne, Australia. Every two years, she returned to Kavi Nagar, a neighborhood in the suburbs of Delhi, to reunite with her family members. “My parents wanted my brother and I to stay connected to our home country. But those trips were very different from those I took as an adult,” she remembers.
She was 21 when she first visited Delhi without her father or mother. The beginning of a long journey that gave birth to a project called “Ghar”. This Hindi term translates to “home”, in English: home, fatherland, root. For five years, Anu Kumar roams the vast country, his medium format camera in hand. “At the beginning, I felt a certain discomfort, because I felt a little awkward in each of my gestures. It was difficult to communicate what I was doing, because I didn’t know it myself. I did as it came. »
For her, this project was both a return and a new beginning. Because, through these photos, “I learned to be Indian, does she provide from Melbourne. It was kind of an exercise in style, I was using my camera as a medium through which to shape my curiosity. A diary by the image, in a way. I understood later that it served as an introduction to the daily rituals of life in India. And, every day a little more, I learned to love these subtle rhythms of life..
Little things that connect
In the pastel and vaporous square of his images, Anu Kumar captures the details of the family home, the powdery light of the megalopolis. She makes modest portraits of her grandmother, her uncles and aunts; she captures their most humble gestures, to transcend them in compositions full of sweetness. The naps in the heat, the preparation of a meal… she captures these moments with a detail, the little things that make a connection. Two parchment feet resting on the mauve of a fabric, the almond green of courgettes in a pewter dish, the crisp crimson of pomegranates, the gray languor of an undone braid: in front of the tenderness of her gaze, the real abandoned.
As much as a family album, Anu Kumar composes an album of colors and materials. “I’ve always liked to find beauty in the most common objects, I didn’t force myself to ‘elevate’ everyday life artificially, she mentions. It’s just that these everyday things captivate me, they’ve always had that effect on me. »
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