In 'The Stars of a Quiet Struggle', photographer Jatin Kampani steps beyond the world of fashion and advertising to document Mumbai’s unacknowledged everyday heroes. Blending the aesthetics of fashion, film, and street photography, the series captures the city’s resilience and beauty through portraits that are both raw and cinematic in nature.
In Jatin Kampani’s latest photo story, ‘The Stars of a Quiet Struggle’, the acclaimed photographer turns his lens away from the glittering world of celebrity and fashion to capture something far more elusive: the resilience and beauty of everyday life in Mumbai. Presented in collaboration with Fujifilm, the series — shot on a digital medium format Fujifilm RF100 camera — is a stirring meditation on resilience, beauty, and survival in a city that never stops moving.
At its core, the series is an homage to Mumbai — a city that often feels like a living organism, pulsating with stories of quiet defiance and hope. For every towering skyline or neon-lit billboard, it’s the millions of unacknowledged individuals — drivers, street vendors, cleaners, artisans, and dreamers — who make the city run. Kampani calls them his “real superheroes”, people who “strive, survive, and shine quietly, without recognition.”
Known for his cinematic portraits and high-fashion imagery, Kampani’s latest body of work finds its emotional charge in the raw, unfiltered theatre of the streets. Shot with the Fujifilm RF100, the project begins in Mumbai’s mid-afternoon light — a challenging time for photographers — where Kampani embraces harsh contrasts, imperfections, and textures as part of the visual language of truth. Later, he carries these moments into a controlled studio setting, reimagining them through the grammar of fashion photography. The result is a compelling dialogue between two worlds that brings together grit and grace, chaos and choreography, realism and representation.
The photoseries taps into a more profound truth about urban India: that beauty is not limited to aspiration, but is also found equally in endurance. In a metropolis marked by inequality and perpetual transformation, resilience becomes both a survival strategy and an art form. Kampani’s lens humanises this resilience, not as a romantic cliché but as a complex emotional state: proud, weary, and luminous.
By merging fashion’s aesthetic precision with street photography’s emotional immediacy, Kampani blurs the boundaries between art and empathy. His subjects are not passive muses but collaborators in the act of being seen. In their faces and postures, we glimpse the poetry of Mumbai’s contradictions; its ability to break you open and still teach you how to begin again.
Watch ‘The Stars Of A Quiet Struggle’ here:
Follow Jatin Kampani here.
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