From its roots in early magazine photo essays to its contemporary reinventions across digital platforms, editorial photography has always been about more than aesthetic allure. In its golden age, the pages of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life reframed how fashion, identity, and culture were perceived. Over time, editorial photography evolved into a mode of visual argument; a fragment of a larger narrative, and a designed moment tethered to mood, context, and intention.

What makes it special is its hybrid nature — it borrows from documentary urgency, cinematic staging, and aesthetic invention to tell stories that hover between real life and dream. Behind each editorial frame lies a choreography of idea, intent, styling, lighting, and story — a negotiation between the literal and the metaphorical. It’s this alchemy of thought and image that gives editorial photography its power. Here are some editorial photographers on our radar who turn image-making into a form of authorship.

India Bharadwaj’s photographic journey began almost serendipitously — she describes it as a “happy accident” — yet from her earliest forays she sensed this would be more than a hobby. Early on, she sneaked into sets while working day jobs, offered to shoot behind-the-scenes, and gradually leveraged those moments into real gigs, like covering concerts and football matches. Over time, she has honed a practice grounded in emotional resonance: her images return again and again to joy, especially within Black and Brown communities, and to her beloved Mumbai — a city whose subcultures and everyday rituals she is intent on revealing to new audiences. She views photography not just as a personal expression, but as a way to preserve moments in cultural history and build connective dialogue.

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Based in the Netherlands, Aaryan Sinha’s photographic practice is anchored in a probing, self-reflective dialogue between place and perception. He works across image, archive, and text to unsettle inherited visual languages around India, especially as those are shaped by colonial gaze and diasporic positioning. His images are neither celebratory nor accusatory — rather, they ask viewers to slow down and see the lived tensions in memory, geography, and representation. He builds visual spaces where legacies of displacement, cultural dissonance, and intergenerational inheritance all resonate at once. In his hands, photography becomes a way to re-map what we think we know — not by erasing stereotyped frames, but by densifying them with the complexity of lived experience.

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Rishi Raj’s journey into photography sprang from the discipline of dance: as a Bharatanatyam graduate from Kalakshetra, he first picked up the camera while still immersed in movement, instinctively translating the rhythms he knew into visual narratives. His images are deeply rooted in the vocabulary of classical Indian art — movement, posture, spatial poise — and his time teaching at Isha Foundation during lockdown, surrounded by nature and dancers, sharpened his focus on dance photography. Drawing inspiration from temple architecture and the carved rhythms of South Indian shrines, he channels architecture itself into his compositions. Influenced by the theatrical sensibility of Tim Walker and grounded in the traditions he grew up among, Rishi’s work lives at the intersection of tradition and self-expression: he uses photography as a space to reimagine beauty, to express his queer identity, and to continuously push at the boundaries of how identity, tradition, and movement may coexist on his terms.

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Ujjaval’s journey into photography began on a trip across northern India with his uncle’s old camera — a moment that quietly redirected his life. What started as casual documentation of landscapes and people soon grew into a deeper curiosity about the cultures, festivals, and faces that make up everyday India. Over the years, this instinct to observe evolved into a refined practice that moves between documentary and fashion. His collaborations with design students in Ahmedabad introduced him to the conceptual side of image-making, while cinema and anime shaped his understanding of mood and colour. Inspired by Raja Ravi Varma’s use of drama and light and Raghu Rai’s sensitivity to the human condition, Ujjaval’s approach balances intuition with intention — constructing images that feel cinematic, snd expansive in what they choose to depict.

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Rahul Bhatt brings together two seemingly disparate worlds — engineering and music — to power a fashion photography practice that is as precise as it is poetic. His technical training gives him fluency with light, optics, and camera mechanics, while his lifelong love for music fuels his sensitivity to rhythm, atmosphere, and emotional narrative. He traces his visual awakening to his habit of pausing world cinema to study lighting, composition, and mood, and internalizing images. Over time, that impulse blossomed into a language where cinematic influence meets photographic discipline. He cites masters like Peter Lindbergh for his profound images, and draws from cinematic visionaries and painters like Caravaggio to learn drama and color. In his view, photography is more than a tool for trend-chasing or celebrity culture; it’s a medium of long-form storytelling, intimate encounters, and visual poetry.

Follow him here.

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