“Since he was a teenager, Debmalya Roy Choudhuri has been using photography as others use “I” in a diary. In 2018, the suicide of his partner in India marked a turning point in his career. Originally from this country, where heterosexuality is the norm and based in the United States, dominated by whiteness, photography became for him a back-and-forth between self and other. Mixing snapshot and staged photography, portrait and self-portrait, black & white, and color, the artist builds an intimate, melancholic œuvre. A factless autobiography — in reference to the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa—presents three profiles made of a multitude of portraits, like so many fragile lives in Donald Trump’s America. Through a collaborative choreography in which the authentic is sometimes colored with dream, the photographer raises here the question of self-affirmation.”- Taous R. Dahmani, art historian and curator (text for Louis Roederer Discovery Award exhibition, Les Rencontres des Arles 2022)
Installation Photographs: © Aurora Valade, © Pauline Vermare, Les Rencontres d’Arles 2022.
An extract from the Trilogy: The Weight of the Earth
