Aniketh Khutia – Imaginaries that make images
“In Imaginaries that make images, I explore the fragmented nature of images, attempting to find what exactly makes something worth looking at. The idea came to me during the start of this pandemic, when I was stuck at my old university in the US. In the few moments I left my home, I found urban life becoming quite hostile. It was losing its sense of coherence, breaking apart to reveal the inconsistencies in the way we think about what it means to really exist in a city, and in what city life confronts us with as opposed to rural life. From that sense of fragmentation, I decided to montage and edit my photographs to represent the same sense of incoherence and identity crisis that often follows the instability of our existence in cities at this point in time. Each moment is an experience within itself, with a backdrop of anxiety and insignificance, with nowhere to go and nowhere to be. Just the incoherent moment itself that we try to grapple. The images are an attempt to embody this same form of fragmentation, looking not just at the picture as a whole, but rather at the parts that can provide significance, ripping away the traditional understanding of coherence.”
About Aniketh Khutia
Ani is a student of Media and Culture at Amsterdam University College, and previously a filmmaking student at Emory University. He grew up in Delhi, India, before moving to the US to pursue filmmaking as a discipline. While working on set for a film, he spent a lot of time talking to photographers, which got him interested in street or un-staged photography. His style reflects the nature of dramatism in candid images; upon finding incoherent moments across his street photographs, the viewer is invited to knit a narrative created when the subject, the artist, and the consumer come together.