Photography anchors Nick Sethi’s life. Joining AnOther over a video call from his apartment in New York, he demonstrates this attachment by pulling out three cameras and sharing that he “never, ever puts them down”. It is an impassioned claim but an honest one, as evidenced by Sethi’s artistic output which includes numerous commercial projects and over 60 publications. Much like in his critically praised book, Khichdi (Kitchari) from 2018, which succinctly documents the photographer’s travels to India over ten years and the ever-changing essence of his familial homeland, his latest project, SRI – shot over three days in the sacred city of Vrindavan in 2022 – is a souvenir, a shrine and cultural document.
Commissioned by Dashwood Projects and Dakota as an installation and photo book that are mirrors to each other, SRI (a Sanskrit word that translates to beauty) documents the physical objects, decorations and rituals that denote respect and value in what is regarded by Hindus as one of India’s most spiritual regions. The work comprises 288 photographs that include shots of a cow’s body marked with saffron handprints, cow dung prepared for fuel, and wood logs tied together with thread. This is then interspersed with images of the people he came across in and around Vrindavan, such as in the photograph of a child sitting atop a kaleidoscopic boat as he balances marigolds, clay candles and matchsticks on a large steel plate.
“I appreciated everything about being in Vrindavan and noticing more carefully the beauty of everyday situations and objects,” shared Sethi. “I would find a wall where someone was simply drying cow dung so they could use it as fuel, but every single thing had to be touched, rolled by hand and placed methodically. There was a lot of care and attention given to the most mundane of tasks, and I wanted to incorporate this care into my work.” At Dashwood, this sentiment materialised in several aspects of the show, from how Sethi carefully adhered each photographic print to the foam-like installation he created, forming an intimate relationship to the work, or in the decision to recruit friends and artists he feels a kinship towards to help physically move the work from his apartment to the exhibition space. “In India, even something as mundane as the transportation of the work can be intentional, and I wanted to bring that to this project.”
Below, in his own words, Nick Sethi tells us more about his photographic practice, travelling in India and the creative impetus behind SRI.
“I take photographs almost religiously; it’s the thing that guides my day and, in a larger sense, my life. It’s a mindfulness practice that gives me the ability to pay attention to things all the time without affecting them too much and then, after closer consideration, choose when to add my own intervention to the image. I’m always thinking of photography this way, regardless of whether I’m at home or in the studio, but especially when I travel.
“When I was travelling in 2022 with my mom, we ended up going to Vrindavan, where her great aunt lives for part of the year. She’s quite a religious person who has studied under different teachers and gurus in the city and is somewhat of a guru herself. I know a little bit of the mythology of the place, but more so than religion, it’s a spirituality that I am drawn to. In an ancient city tied to religion in a mythological sense, there’s so much respect for everything and for preserving things the way they are. Just having that lens drove me to deliver this project without setting it out to be a book or a show. None of it was pre-planned.
“If you look at the photograph of the cow covered in handprints, there’s a possibility that the hands denote ownership, or it could be done for a religious ceremony, or it could purely be decoration, and I wanted to sit in that confusion trying to figure out what this decoration meant. In a way, a lot of what I photographed was me trying to work out what I was seeing for myself and interpret it through my own experience and spirituality. In Vrindavan, there is a sense that most objects denote utility, spirituality, decoration and ritual, and most of my photographs lie somewhere in that Venn diagram.
"The book and the sculpture are just two incarnations of each other. They’re the same photos in the same order, and I made it chronological as I wanted the project to be open-ended and mimic a train of thought rather than be guided by something specific I wanted to convey.
“My experience with India is that it’s a place where, the more defined your expectations are, the more those things are not going to go your way, and the more you can kind of let serendipitous things take over, the more gratifying the experience will be. I travelled to Vrindavan to be with my mum for two days and to go on a little vacation with her, and the byproduct of that was a book and a show that I feel really excited about.”
SRI by Nick Sethi is published by Dakota / Dashwood Books, and is out now.