Projects That Capture How India Sees Itself: Inside The Indian Photo Festival 2025

India’s longest-running international photography festival returns to the city of Hyderabad this November, presenting its eleventh edition under the auspices of the Light Craft Foundation. The festival runs from November 20, 2025 to January 4, 2026, across venues including the State Gallery of Art, Madhapur and other spaces within the city. This iteration of the festival is rooted in its explicit commitment to visual storytelling as a force for change: the programme emphasises photography that engages questions of identity, culture and social justice.

Beyond exhibitions, this year’s festival strengthens its role as a creative ecosystem by offering mentorships, workshops and portfolio reviews designed to nurture emerging talent. In doing so, it positions Hyderabad as a regional hub for photographic discourse, drawing national and international practitioners into conversation with India’s visual-culture context. The festival invites viewers to experience photography as a site of encounter — between maker, subject and audience.

The exhibitions at this year’s Indian Photo Festival move between the personal and the political, often blurring the distinction between lived experience and collective reality. Ranita Roy’s 'Something Watching You' transforms the paralyzing stillness of sleep paralysis into a visual language of fear and fragility. Her images, shaped by childhood solitude and nocturnal terror, turn private unease into empathy, urging recognition of the unseen burdens that the mind carries. In contrast, Hari Priya’s 'Blueming' finds solace in water. Drawing from her move between Hyderabad and New York, she creates meditative cyanotypes inspired by the neuroscience of 'blue mind' — the psychological calm evoked by proximity to water. Through performative self-portraits where her own body becomes the site of lichen growth, she visualizes how stillness, community, and environment nurture resilience. Together, both artists articulate how the body becomes a landscape for memory, fear, and restoration.

Hridya Sadanand’s 'Cooking with Taboo' shifts the focus to another kind of inheritance: one that circulates through belief, and gendered rituals. Through carefully staged images and recollections from her home in Kozhikode, she questions the domestic laws that define women’s bodies as impure during menstruation. Her work sits at the intersection of photography and social testimony, mapping how superstition transforms into social codes. In documenting this, she reconstructs the emotional architecture of belief that is both intimate and oppressive.

Yuvraj Khanna’s 'Moti Talkies' mourns a fading public space. His photographs of Old Delhi’s last surviving single-screen theatre that once was a neighbourhood landmark screening Bollywood classics. Moti Talkies became a sanctuary for Bhojpuri-speaking migrant labourers — a place where film and language offered reprieve from alienation. Khanna captures the melancholy of its decline, suggesting that the loss of such spaces is also the loss of community memory.

Meanwhile, Alisha Vasudev’s 'Saukaash Jaa' expands the field of authorship altogether. Her participatory project with farmers in Maharashtra’s Ratnagiri district foregrounds local knowledge in an age of climate precarity. By allowing community members to curate and narrate their own photographs, Vasudev turns documentation into dialogue. The resulting images, accompanied by farmers' voices and shared through WhatsApp and YouTube, reveal how lived wisdom contends with environmental uncertainty. Through these expressions, her work restores agency to those most affected by ecological change.

In bringing together such distinct voices, the Indian Photo Festival 2025 highlights how photography in India has become an act of inquiry. The works on view are marked by authorship, and context — each shaped by the photographer’s need to understand something through visuality. Whether confronting inherited fear, ritual, or land, these artists turn the lens into a tool for reflection and resistance. In its eleventh edition, the festival stands as a living archive of how India sees itself today: curious, reflective, and attentive to the multiplicity of its own stories.

Follow Indian Photo Festival here and checkout the festival schedule on their website.

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