PHOTO DIVINE STUDIO (2018-...)

We have known each other for over 20 years and have built a deep and rich friendship. Before we met, we both, individually, made repeated trips to work in India, where the mystery and grace of daily life is equal to the core of the photography we are continually searching for. These were magical, life changing experiences. Now, we are collaborating on a work that combines our individual vision and mentality, in the exploration of a land that has a profound hold on both of us.

Our time there exposes us to the primordial. It is an endless search for meaning through the mysterious, the unexpected, the unknown. We seek what we cannot rationally understand, we photograph intuitively, searching for connection. We welcome the tension between opposites, a continuous origin of wonder. India is a pretext and the ideal territory for our story. Reality and fiction have transparent boundaries that often blur.

The open coexistence of, and thin line between, life and death, beauty and horror, tradition and chaos, are omnipresent in India as we never experienced so powerfully elsewhere. What is "ordinary" in many layers of life here is invisible in our society. Of the many dualities, the most vital and intriguing for us is the relationship between animals and humans. This is economic but also cultural and spiritual. Many Indian cities are freely inhabited by animals so the coexistence is both intimate and independent.

In Calcutta, before dawn, a heavy fog overtakes Maidan Park while horses wait to start the day’s work. Walking through this whiteness we never know when the horses will reveal themselves. In Delhi on the Yamuna river, migrating birds are fed by a boatman. In Mathura, the destruction of the forest forced the monkeys to survive in the city. In Orchha vultures are brought back from extinction. In Benares a keeper of snakes, monkeys and an elephant provides for a family of 27. During night walks, in streets empty of people, we are followed by solitary dogs, hoping for food, and maybe for contact.

Photo Divine Studio was a long defunct portrait studio in Calcutta, in Nimtala Ghat, the city’s cremation grounds. It’s here that for hundreds of years, funeral rights have been performed for both people and animals. A particular genre took shape - photography of the dead. The studio provided photographs of the families with the dead relative and pictures of the dead posed as alive. Simultaneously immortalizing and letting go.

Over 3 years 3 and voyages, we worked together, to share the experience and the photographs, not caring about authorship of images. We established our own itinerant Photo Divine Studio. It is the first time we've worked in such collaboration and the exciting process of helping and challenging each other continues in the editing. We intend to make a final journey to deepen our research for the work in progress to create a book and exhibition/installation with photographs and super 8 projections..

Text by Michael Ackerman & Lorenzo Castore