Photographs As Relics Of Feelings: The Ethereal Image-Making Practice Of Vijay Sarathy
There is something out of this world about the images Vijay Sarathy makes. They often appear to belong to another world, drifting between dream, memory, and reality. Yet within their soft hues and hazy skies exists a sense of familiarity, like the fading texture of a half-forgotten dream or the warmth of a memory just out of reach. In recent years, the self-taught photographer from Chennai has developed a distinct visual language that fuses the emotional fidelity of painting with the tactile experimentation of analogue photography. His images evoke interior states, where the emotional and the atmospheric dissolve into one another.
This lyrical and introspective body of work emerged from a deliberate act of retreat. Several years ago, Sarathy left behind the rhythm of city life and relocated to a remote village in the Himalayan foothills. It is from this landscape of solitude and wildness that his photographs now emerge as tender studies in mood, place, and presence. Speaking to Homegrown from his home in the mountains, Sarathy recently reflected on the emotional terrain that underpins his practice, and the influences behind his otherworldly images.
You’re a self-taught photographer, yet your images carry the sensibility of a trained painter. How did you train your photographic eye? Whose work — inside or outside the world of photography — has shaped your way of seeing?
I’ve always loved the emotional immediacy of paintings — you know that feeling you get when you stand in front of a painting and it affects you almost instantly? you feel it in your body before you even start thinking about the narrative or whatever the facts of the painting are. I wanted my photographs to have that same connect too — I wanted them to be these relics of feeling, so you’re right in that the medium of painting has been an influence.
I actually started out way on the other side with photography, making narrative-driven, and factual documentary and street photography. I think after a point I realized I was pretty bored with it. I wanted my work to feel more intimate, and more immediate.
Right around that time, I came across photographers from the West making these really evocative images — Maya Beano, Margaret Durow, Neil Krug, Tristan Hollingworth. They were documenting their life, but in their images, there was also this intense vulnerability — like they were documenting moments not as they saw it, but as they felt it, as it registered in their inner world. That way of working really spoke to me. It had the intimacy I was looking for.
Your photographs often feel like fragments of dreams — tender, layered, and ephemeral. What first drew you to working with multiple exposures, and how has your approach to this technique evolved over time? What are some of the different post-processing techniques you use to make images?
Double exposures are amazing because it’s almost like opening a door within the image — you just really expand what a photograph can be and what it can represent. I was drawn to them because it felt like a great way to take the work away from the factual, away from defined narratives into something more abstract and mysterious. What I also love about them is they are pure intuition and flow. When making them, you kinda have to leave your thinking brain at the door and just be emotionally open.
A lot of the feeling in the work I think comes from my post — I’ve developed my own process in LIghtroom over the years. I also sometimes try to affect the image coming out of the camera by shooting through a filter (or even translucent plastic bags), great way to remove a lot of the digital detail — you get a more fuzzier and interesting image to start with.
Themes of memory, longing, and connection to the natural world seem to resonate deeply in your body of work. How do you translate something internal, like feelings and memory, into an outward medium like the photographic image?
When I shifted to the Himalayas 6 years back, I was really moved by the landscapes I was finding there. And the question has always been — how do I make these landscapes feel personal? How do I communicate how being here is affecting me?
I think it’s about subjectivity… just trying to figure out how to put a bit of you into this very definitive objective document that a photograph is. I think it’s also about paying attention to your inner world, when you’re out on the field. when you are tuned in to yourself — certain moments jump out at you, imprint on you a certain way. And then it’s coming back and with post, you are just trying to lean into that feeling, trying to deepen that as much as you can.
I look at it like this. Every photograph that you make and you bring into post, I think it wants to go home. And that is a place within you, a kind of inner arriving. And your job as an artist, maybe the only real job, is to get out of your own way and to walk it home.
There’s a moodiness to your images that feels rooted in nostalgia, melancholy, and yearning. How do your personal experiences shape your creative process?
I’ve always experienced life intensely, everything always felt really vivid, like the volume on how I receive from the world is turned all the way up. I think that definitely plays a part in why I make things the way I do.
I also had a rough upbringing, and quite early on, I learnt to create a world for myself, maybe to just get away from what was happening for a while. I remember feeling unmoored for the longest time, always kinda detached and adrift. It’s like being the only person on an island when everyone else is at shore. I feel that less often these days, but I think my work still taps into that space, just that feeling of being a stranger in a strange land. Someone merely visiting.
Are you currently working on any projects that you’d like to tell us about? Is there a difference in how you are making images for this project from how you make images for sharing online?
I’m chipping away at my first book slowly. There’s definitely more curation and narrative involved in this, what I share online is more loose and fragmented. With this book, I’d like for it to be a confession, of my time in solitude in the last 6 years — my time in nature and how it’s shaped me.
I’ve also been really getting into video as a medium and have been exploring translating my language into audio-visual. That’s been exciting too.
Follow Vijay Sarathy here.
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