Portfolios
An Artist’s Collages about Memory and Migration
Priya Suresh Kambli works with pictures of her family in India and the US, making connections between past and present.
When she was four or five years old, Priya Suresh Kambli watched her mother cut out her own face from family photographs. Kambli’s mother left the pictures of her daughters, Priya and her elder sister, Sona, intact. This act of simultaneous erasure and preservation fascinated Kambli. Decades later, she brings the same dialectic into play when creating her own artworks drawn from family photo-albums.
Kambli was born in 1975, in the Indian city of Mumbai, then called Bombay, and came to the United States at the age of eighteen. A few years earlier, Kambli’s mother had died from cancer, and just six months later, her father had suffered a fatal heart attack. In the period that followed, Kambli was adrift. One of her aunts, a pediatrician in Louisiana, sponsored Kambli’s move. Art hadn’t, so far, been a part of her repertoire, and photography was even less attractive to her. Kambli’s father, however, a trained pastry chef, had been an avid amateur photographer. As a child, her father’s fussiness over his pictures, and the time he took arranging his family’s poses, felt like punishment. But, as an undergrad, Kambli enjoyed her photography class. She didn’t have her father’s Minolta, so she borrowed a camera from her aunt’s husband.
Aperture Magazine Subscription
0.00
By graduate school she had discovered the excitement of creating art. She was learning from the work of artists such as Carrie Mae Weems and Lorna Simpson, who were interested in issues of identity, but she also experienced a sense of dissatisfaction with Western image making. In 2003, Kambli traveled to New York to see an exhibition from the Alkazi Collection of Photography. The pictures were mostly taken in India, and Kambli remembers being “blown away” by the hand-painted portraits showing some parts of the figure in black and white while other parts, particularly clothing and jewelry, were rendered in glittering color. These vernacular images in the pristine white gallery space, Kambli says, were very much like those in the two albums of family photographs she had brought in her suitcase from India. She began to work with those familial pictures, embellishing them in different ways, making connections between her present and her past.
As Kambli was telling me all this over Zoom from her home in Kirksville, Missouri, I was thinking about her images in which faces are obscured—in one depicting her maternal aunt, Mami (2016), the face is left only partially visible under a decorative arrangement of flour. Flour was always at hand in the home of a pastry chef, and the patterns are borrowed from the traditional Indian practice of rangoli drawings, which are used during festivals or seen printed on textiles. It is difficult not to think of Kambli’s practice as therapeutic: the artist returns to a disquieting memory of her mother disfiguring photographs and then produces a transformed object that bears traces of its past but is altogether new and beautiful.
In his book Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (1997), a classic study of the role of portraiture in India, Christopher Pinney describes a photography studio as a “chamber of dreams.” Pinney observes that in the small town in India where he was conducting his anthropological study, the creativity of the studio photographer as well as his subjects lay in their envisioning fluid selves that defied any narrow, realistic self-representation. In Kambli’s images, we are no longer in small-town India, but the impulse is the same. There is imaginative storytelling about possible selves, among them a cosmopolitan iteration stretching across continents. What we see over and over again, in collagelike constructions, are numerous selves tied to different temporalities and identities.
Many years ago, Kambli was watching Sesame Street with her child. On the show, the characters were demonstrating how to make a rainbow. That idea stuck in her head. Photography plays with light, and Kambli wanted to explore light’s mercurial nature. For her fortieth birthday, Kambli asked her husband for a prism. For the longest time, she couldn’t figure out how to make it work. The prism sat in her studio for two years until, one day, she picked it up and, as if by magic, the colors appeared.
All works courtesy the artist
This article originally appeared in Aperture, issue 251, “Being & Becoming: Asian in America.”