Kartikeya Malhotra

Your work focuses on the “unseen currents” beneath the surface of human experience. How do you translate these invisible emotions into visual form?

I don’t see it as a translation. It’s more an act of recognition. I believe these internal states, these invisible emotions have echoes in the external world. It could be a certain quality of light, the contour of a landscape, the atmosphere of an empty room or the way distance sits between two people. My work is about finding these moments of resonance where the inner world and the outer world align. The photograph isn’t a depiction of an emotion; but a canvas where that emotion can be felt.

In your statement you describe your practice as “witnessing.” Could you elaborate on what witnessing means to you in the context of photography?

To witness is to surrender judgment, to remove oneself as much as possible. It’s the act of observing without trying to possess. In my process, witnessing means standing in quiet observation until the world arranges itself into meaning. When I am photographing, I don’t try to impose a narrative but allow one to reveal itself to me. The resulting image is not something I have created, but something that happened.

The project What the sea remembers reimagines the coast as a threshold to the subconscious. What first inspired you to explore the sea in this way?

The sea has always felt like a mirror to my mind – vast, reflective, and cryptic. It kind of holds history without keeping records. I was drawn to that duality, to its permanence and its indifference. The project became a way to stand at the edge of that mystery and simply look.

How do you approach the idea of memory in your photographs—do you see images as fixed records, or as shifting, fluid impressions?

For me, they are certainly fluid impressions.In fact, memory, like water, is fluid. It never holds the same shape twice. I have little interest in the photograph as a factual record. Like memory itself, an image is a reconstruction, an echo, a feeling that remains after the event is gone. Each time I look at an image, it changes — not because the photograph changes, but because I do. In that way, my work is less about preserving the past and more about watching memories reform themselves.

Water often symbolizes both permanence and impermanence. How do you reconcile these opposing qualities in your work?

I don’t try to reconcile them. I’m drawn to that tension precisely because it’s irreconcilable. It is a fundamental truth of existence. The ocean is ancient, a permanent feature of our world, yet no two waves are ever the same. I love that duality. I feel it’s true to how human experience works, always changing, yet somehow the same.

Your images feel like fragments of a larger unspoken narrative. Do you plan them in advance, or do you allow them to emerge intuitively while shooting?

It begins with intuition. I go to a place with a question or feeling in my mind that I can’t articulate quite yet, but the images themselves are found, not made. And then, everyday the narrative starts to reveal itself. Later, while editing, is where it all comes together. Patterns of tone, gesture, and colour emerge, and that’s when I begin shaping the entire story.

What role does silence play in your creative process?

Silence is the medium. It’s the prerequisite for everything else. It is in the quiet moments that we can begin to perceive the “unseen currents. It feels a bit odd to say this, because most of the time I feel like my mind is a storm. A lot of things are going on at the same time. But sometimes, when I pick up the camera, I can reach this quiet, meditative space inside where I am receptive enough to perceive these”unseen currents”. My process requires internal silence to be receptive, and the final images are, I hope, an offering of silence to the viewer, a space where they can pause and feel, free from the noise of the world.