Existential: Puranjani Kabra’s photo exhibition

Puranjani Kabra’s tryst with the DSLR started five years ago. “It was then that I understood the techniques and realised that photography is not just about taking photos, it’s an art,” she says.

The final-year student of Literature at St. Francis will soon be holding a two-day exhibition of her photographs titled Existential, a series that was born during a summer course on photography at Columbia University, New York. “I learnt a lot during that course.

The aesthetics of photography, how to understand and click photos etc. I remember my professor also told me that you have to make photography personal. Art should help people connect with emotions,” she says, adding, “I also met a lot of eminent people like Elinor Corucci.”

By the end of the six-week course, Puranjani had to put up her work on display at Columbia (the same series that she will be displaying in the city). “When I started clicking I didn’t know what my subject would be. I walked around the streets of New York indulging in street photography. And then I started clicking self portraits. I named it ‘Existential’ to basically show what I was going through and through photos what others were going through as well.”

And Puranjani surprised all. “My sister said she was seeing another side of me, that she hadn’t seen.”