“To this day, I don’t take photos of my social life. My parents get so annoyed about it, they’re like ‘What’s the point of being friends with a photographer?’” Anu Kumar says.
It’s something of an irony, given the Melbourne-based photographer is known for her soft film compositions that record the intimate, everyday moments of her family life back in India.
But Kumar notes that, unlike many others in her profession, she was never (and still isn’t) “obsessed” with the art of photography. “I would get annoyed at people taking photos all the time when we were out with friends.” In fact, she didn’t pick up a camera until the age of 21 when she backpacked for six months around India and Nepal, after failing her third year of occupational therapy study.
Once she had discovered and embraced the camera, Kumar returned to Melbourne and enrolled in a bachelor of commercial photography at RMIT – something she never thought was a possibility. “I’ve always been super creative, but I didn’t even think it was a potential path for me. My dad is an engineer, my mum’s a doctor, so they’ve typically taken the very academic way,” she says.
Fast forward more than a decade, and Kumar’s Ghar series has been featured in Vogue, the NGV’s Melbourne Now exhibition, and been published as a photobook of the same name. “Ghar” translates to “home” in Hindi, and the project is a diary of images from Kumar’s many trips to her family home in Kavi Nagar, Ghaziabad, near New Delhi.
Instead of visiting for a few weeks, snapping, and leaving, Kumar spent months at a time over the course of 10 years capturing, she says, the “in-between gestural moments that punctuated my days in India”. With a powdery, pastel light, there are tender scenes of family members cutting fruit, taking a nap in the heat and dyeing their hair at home. It’s the kind of raw stillness that can only be found by spending a lot of time in one place, she says.
The initial motivation for the series came from a wish to connect with her “Indian-ness”. “I was always quite insecure about where I belong. It’s hard to be born in one place, and then kind of taken away from there and into a place that is foreign, and you don’t look like the people around you. So it was a very homecoming experience.”
Through Ghar, Kumar found the answers around identity she was searching for while recording important timestamps during her twenties and thirties. “It has enriched my life in so many ways. I’ve gotten way closer to my family, my Hindi is better, my connection to India is better and I feel like I have a much more stable and secure sense of belonging as a result. I say at the end of the book that if nothing happens of it, if no one buys it, no one reads it, it doesn’t matter because I will have this archive of my family.”
It also meant that Kumar had 5000 photographs to narrow down to under 100 when pulling together her book, which was published at the end of 2022.
When asked if it ever felt strange to photograph her family, Kumar says her clan are a generous bunch who never change for the camera. “They’ve always kind of let me be. It’s not that they don’t understand what’s going on with my photography, it’s just that I don’t think they care that much,” she jokes.
These days, the photographer splits her time between working part-time at an art gallery and hanging out in her first ever studio space in Preston. Here, Kumar scans film and tinkers away at a second book that is currently in the works.
If Ghar is about discovery, the next publication will focus on grief and saying farewell.
“My family is getting quite old and I don’t know if I can be making this kind of work forever,” she says. “It’s been such a big part of my life, so to think about a future in which I’m not doing that makes me quite sad. But in my mind, I already know that I’m going to have to say goodbye to documenting my family, so the second book is about letting go and acceptance.”
This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.
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