A dog stands against a heap of sand; behind this solitary animal, men and women, dwarfed by distance, harvest salt from vast salt pans; in the background, transmission towers rise from the barren landscape like monuments to industrialism. Elsewhere, men walk through an opening, as if through a portal, towards docked ships surrounded by smoke. Wild vegetation grows over an abandoned warehouse. These are the protagonists of ‘EASTWARD’, photographer and filmmaker Sunhil Sippy’s first solo exhibition, on view at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke till 15 July 2026.

Photographers have long presented Mumbai as a city of extremes: the vertiginous wealth of its reclaimed western coastline in stark contrast to the claustrophobic density of its populous underclass. In ‘EASTWARD’, Sunhil Sippy presents Mumbai’s eastern seaboard as another register of the city: a kind of blind spot, geographically proximate to its iconic, immediately recognisable skyline yet systematically outside the frame of the city’s aspirational self-image.

Sippy’s photographs collapse the binaries between the natural and the man-made, between ecological ruin and vegetational growth, and between human exhaustion and survival instincts, all of which underpin Mumbai’s never-ending story of urban expansion.

This places his body of work in conversation with the photographic movement known as the ‘New Topographics’ — a term coined by William Jenkins in 1975 to describe a group of American photographers, such as Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Nicholas Nixon, and Bernd and Hiller Becher, whose pictures shared a similar formal, mostly black-and-white aesthetic. The New Topographers were inspired by man-made subjects such as parking lots, suburban housing, industrial architecture, and warehouses, and depicted them with a beautiful, stark austerity.

Sippy’s Mumbai is denser, grittier, and more volatile than the New Topographers’ industrial America — shaped by postcolonial accelerationism, informal labour economies, and ecological collapse occurring simultaneously across the eastern seabed. Shot largely on 6x6 medium-format film — which typically yields 12 square exposures per roll, requiring greater intentionality at the moment of shooting — his images capture not only what is visible inside the frame, but what is felt in the moment of exposure. They highlight atmospheres, disturbances, and emotional intensities that cannot be fully composed in advance. They are romantic in their austere beauty, but they do not necessarily romanticise austerity itself.

In her paradigm-shifting text ‘On Photography’ (1976), Susan Sontag argued that cameras liberate our gaze by detaching subjects from the rush of normal time, freezing them for scrutiny. Sippy’s archive, accumulated over more than a decade through cycles of wandering and return, resists the conventional logic of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” — the singular, striking instant of action — as well as the model of photographic projects organized around a single, unifying theme. Instead, his practice proposes photography as an ongoing encounter. By returning to the same places, he seeks to capture time itself, producing images that record temporality in the grain, texture, and tonal density of the film.

“Unlike photographers who often work toward a predetermined series or systematically construct a body of work, (…) His images were shot over many years without a fixed plan, accumulating gradually through repeated returns to the eastern seaboard and other industrial and transitional landscapes of Mumbai,” art historian Anisha Palat writes in her curatorial essay.

By increasingly avoiding the viewfinder in his more recent photographs (he showed me his Hasselblad 903SWC, which does not have a viewfinder, when I interviewed him in 2025), Sippy has also moved away from photography as a framing of the visual and toward photography as sensation. In avoiding the viewfinder, he grants the viewer access to a more intimate visual consciousness, shaped as much by affect as by sight. With ‘EASTWARD’, he has mapped a counter-cartography of Mumbai, insisting on a city composed not only of its visible urbanity but also of the overlooked worlds that silently, stubbornly persist beneath its surface.

‘EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard’, Sunhil Sippy’s first solo exhibition, is on view at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke from 15 May till 15 July, 2026. Learn more here.

Follow @sunhilsippy and @galeriemirchandanisteinruecke on Instagram.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

The Opium Of Time: In Conversation With Photographer & Filmmaker Sunhil Sippy

‘Stars Of A Quiet Struggle’ Highlights The Resilience & Poetry Of Mumbai’s Contradictions

Photoseries ‘Stories From The Streets’ Captures The Quiet Everyday Rituals Of Urban India