A friend of mine once told me that our need to watch something while eating comes from our cavemen days. He said that as we sat in our camps with our dinner, we would stare at the fire, chewing our food, trying to process everything that had happened throughout the day. After a day of hunting, this was the only time we had to allow our minds to wander and contemplate. This, I feel even happens today, espeically when the object before us isn't a screen overstimulating our imagination.
Lending something your extended attention is a kind of meditation. As you look at an object you have a history with, your relationship starts to unfold the more you stay on it. The keyboard my dad bought me when I was a kid, that I no longer play, is a painful reminder and example of this. Everytime I look at it, it grips me into this twisted memory I share with it. Just as the keyboard sits there collecting dust, I too become engulfed with the moments, both real and imagined I associate with it. In this way, perception becomes sedimentary; layer upon layer of meaning and emotion folding into what we see.
Photographs do this too. They grab us, and send us into an internal slideshow of emotions if they carry something that resonates with us. But what is it that allows a photograph to reach out and hold your gaze? What makes you stay?
Some call it visual intrigue, which is precisely what lies at the core of Tanmay Saxena’s images. Introspective, emotionally rich, and rooted in a kind of tender estrangement, they hold space for everything unspoken.
Describing his practice as “a collusion of fantasy, sometimes with a factual veneer,” Tanmay speaks of image-making not as a career, but a necessity. His work unfolds as a "socio-political and emotional commentary from a humanficial perspective,"; through poetry via lens and light, rather than verse. That innate push toward storytelling came to him early, though the world he grew up in didn’t yet have a name for it.
“I grew up during the 90s in a tiny village town in North India,” he shares. “Back then, B and C-tier towns were polarisingly different compared to now. The closed economy shaped society’s mood, and that collective lack of confidence reflected everywhere.” Amid that backdrop of constraint and conservatism, a young Tanmay absorbed the world with an accute sensitivity.
When I create, I don't notice or trace the visual or cultural influences. It is only when we look back and notice, we get the subtle hints and impressions: the little neighbourhood I grew up in, the abundance of different smells, sounds, religions, practices and customs, sellers on streets, their calling jingles, the village fair that would come once a year for a month and the all-night rush on the road in front of my room's window. It felt like the entire world was going to the fair. There was a lot that was registered and delicately saved in the active and impressionable subconscious of a little kid."Tanmay Saxena
But he was also solitary; an introvert who found company in imaginary friends, comic books, and television. Art, for a long time, remained unspeakable. “Even after having a naturally creative streak, I or my parents could not imagine me being an artist when I grew up,” he reflects. “So I walked the beaten path and ended up working as a Business Analyst after finishing my MBA in India.”
It was an overseas work stint that turned the tide. “I was sent to the UK for a year. A complete lack of social circle or friends meant loneliness, but it also meant getting in touch with my creative self again.” For a time, he failed freely and privately. And that freedom became fertile ground. A decade later, he left his day job behind and began LaneFortyfive, his first creative outlet through fabric and clothing design.
As he built a visual identity for the label, he directed others to shoot his ideas until he realised that his vision was being diluted in translation. “I felt my creative voice needed to be heard in full,” he says. “So I bought my first camera.”
Now based in London, Tanmay doesn’t see his Indian roots and British life as binary poles to reconcile. “The key here was, I became an artist out of a need for self-expression, not as a career move. India gave me a deeply emotional, emotionally receptive, and giving sensibility during the formative years. The UK or London in particular flowered this sensibility into a platform which I could express myself creatively from.” That duality, he says, is what untethers his perception from belonging to one place or another. “Instead, it is loose and flutters around, which I find to be a blessing.”
His artistic language, spread across photography, film, fashion, words, and illustration, often carries solitary figures and a distinct sense of quietude. “I find that I am drawn to presenting solitude,” he notes, whether it’s a “professional letter writer who comes across as a thinker, sharp-witted with a pure heart and a crack or two,” or anonymous bodies in monochromatic stillness.
I observe and absorb the ongoings around me quite effortlessly. This easily seeps into my photography, film, or painting works in sometimes explicit, but mostly in subtle ways. I cannot be emotional and not be philosophical. The two go hand in hand and naturally become an integral voice of my work. Both to me relate to feeling deeply about almost everything, from tea with biscuits, to matters of heart. It seems to be in my bones. And then somehow, these layers combine and lay themselves over a subject and weave a story that I am then able to recognise and bring out through one of the mediums.Tanmay Saxena
Animals, too, play a recurring role — often entering the frame in uncanny proximity to humans. His fascination with them took root after reading John Berger’s 'Why Look at Animals?'. "I find this relationship to be extremely fluid and shape shifting", he shares. "I enjoy and like to put the two in the same frame without letting the background story or context be known. There is an uneasy energy to begin with which stays till the end. In most of the situations, the human is unknown to the animal. I find it fascinating how the animal recognizes that it is being watched by the camera's eyes, and reacts to that in the company of another stranger, the human, who in the scene has a shift in energy too. It is not a familiar setting for either one of them. The awkwardness is palpable, priceless, and raw. For a while, they become equally vulnerable, primal, and guilty."
This same vulnerability pulses through his short films like 'A transitional sleep in two layers' and 'Life, a minute later' — fragments of memory and metaphor rendered in video form. “An idea is at times suited more to just still images. Whereas some ideas deserve to physically move on the screen,” he explains. These works are deceptively brief, but layered. “With time, I appreciate more the art of saying a lot via saying a lot less... these videos capture something emotionally and philosophically verbose and the multiplanar expression of the idea becomes a possibility.”
Tanmay's body of work is a re-authoring of the visual, emotional, and psychological stimuli he has gathered over time and it is filled with stories that you must discover yourself.
"I like when there are layers involved under the surface," he says. "To put it in your mouth like a candy, and then to let it dissolve and thin with time — that is where the unlayering happens. That is what I find rewarding. When I do stumble upon an idea, I let it rest and gather layers. The mood deepens, textures become complex and scaly. But the core still remains extremely simple."
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