SHARBENDU DE

MOSAIC: Do you think subjects such as ecology and biodiversity have an important place in conversations around art?

Sharbendu De: Many more artists and cultural practitioners are gravitating towards engaging with ecological discourse today. Amitav Ghosh, in “The Great Derangement”, asks a powerful question: Is the Earth itself giving us signals and compelling us to listen? We may call it artistic imagination, but it is worth asking why so many artists, writers, and filmmakers are increasingly drawn to dealing with ecology in their work.

I see this firsthand as a writer and educator. In 2023, I conceived  an online mentorship programme, ‘Decoding Anthropocene’, for South Asian lens-based artists who use visual storytelling to deal with climate and ecological concerns. Even today, we don’t have many credible learning platforms in our region. The challenge begins with language. For example, even the phrase ‘climate change’ is political. It sounds as though the climate is changing on its own, abdicating us humans of our culpability. Such a phraseology could not have been accidental, but very much intentional. I prefer the term climate crisis. There is a sense of urgency, reflecting today’s real-time situation. Most climate conversations remain confined to academic, scientific, and cultural echo chambers using a vocabulary that alienates us rather than enabling inclusivity and collectivisation. Art has the responsibility and the opportunity to flip this on its head. But that needs radical thinking.

MOSAIC: What emotion or message are you trying to portray across your works?

Sharbendu De: I don’t create work to deliver a message; I don’t believe in preaching. As an artist, I’d rather raise questions than offer answers. “Imagined Homeland”, for example, grew out of my prolonged and sustained engagement with the Lisu community that lives on the India-Myanmar border. I had arrived with assumptions, but their stories of loss, resilience, and grace shifted something within me. Additionally, the dense forests, which are quintessentially a force of nature, drove many mystical experiences, learnings, as well as messages. Once you experience uncanny events, you cannot return to leaning on logic alone.

I avoid forcing conclusions because life rarely offers simple solutions. I resist binaries. So, I prefer that  the viewers enter the works with their own perspectives, but leave with lingering thoughts that doggedly keep questioning them. My ideas  are shaped by literature, philosophy, psychology, poetry, cinema and ecology, as well as by active flights of imagination. Photography is a tool, a medium. Over time, I’ve realised that to become a better photographer, one has to move further and beyond photography itself.

“An Elegy for Ecology” began during Delhi’s smog in 2016. Like many others, I photographed it, but I soon questioned whether repeating the same images served any purpose beyond satiating my ego. That question came from my earlier experiences of documenting disasters, beginning with the 2004 tsunami in the Andaman Islands, where I grew up, and later working in disaster response and rehabilitation.

Those experiences helped shape my role to tell often-ignored stories, instead of regurgitating familiar sensationalistic images of tragedies.

MOSAIC: You mentioned you didn’t want to do what other photographers were doing while documenting disasters. Was that a conscious decision to take a different, more creative approach?

Sharbendu De: Absolutely. There is a concept by Susan Sontag called ‘compassion fatigue’, which simply means that constant exposure to images of violence, disasters, and suffering  eventually numbs us. Then we stop seeing people and begin seeing them as statistics. In the fraught after project of earning more eyeballs, our empathy takes a hit.

That made me question my own practice. Was I helping people understand a crisis, or simply repeating familiar images? The real challenge wasn’t telling the story; it was ensuring the audience could still connect with it emotionally.

This became clearer during the 2015 Nepal earthquake. Having worked in seven natural disasters after the 2004 tsunami in the Andaman Islands, I had closely observed the production-consumption politics of the media. So, instead of photographing the physicality of destruction again, I became interested in people’s interior emotional landscapes.

That led to “Between Grief and Nothing”, a body of work exploring trauma and mental health. People appeared calm on the outside, but were carrying immense psychological turmoil. I wanted to photograph what couldn’t be seen. Since then, my practice has moved away from overt images of suffering. I look for quieter, more layered ways of telling stories that can bypass the numbness we all experience today. If other photographers are already documenting one aspect well, I’d rather amplify their work and explore another dimension. Together, those stories can help create a fuller picture.

Works like Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother”, 1936, which is about a woman named Florence Owen Thompson in the midst of the Great American Depression, or Picasso’s “Guernica”, continue to echo because they invite multiple interpretations. That’s something I consciously strive for. In “Imagined Homeland”, a photograph titled ‘In the Middle of a Stream’, shot in 2019, of a woman crossing a stream with her children, sparse belongings, a dog and a duck, raises questions without answering them. Where are they going? Why are they standing in the middle of a stream, and is a stream a mere physical water body? What have they left behind? Is this a representation of a complete family unit, and if it is so, why is the adult male figure missing? The image becomes about migration, resilience, family and hope, all at once, and yet it remains about that precise moment now frozen for eternity–they shall continue to stand in the middle of that stream with no escape. What do they tell us about our respective journeys, literal and metaphorical ones? It is also a feminist position.

MOSAIC: Who is your audience, and how has your work been received?

Sharbendu De: The easy answer is that everyone is my audience, but that’s not true. My work is largely received by urban audiences who have had some exposure to art and culture. They’re also the people with greater social, economic, and cultural influence, so it makes sense to engage them. At the same time, I don’t see indigenous communities as my immediate audience but rather as my teachers and collaborators. “Imagined Homeland” became what it is because of the Lisu community and everything they allowed me to witness. They taught me kindness, empathy, resilience and a way of living that cannot be learnt from books and intellectual discourses while sitting in air-conditioned halls. Moving away from Delhi to a quieter place, living years close to forests and indigenous communities has only deepened those reflections.

Some of the most meaningful responses to my works have come from unexpected places outside the traditional art spaces. I remember a mother and her young son at the Serendipity Arts Festival in Panjim in 2019. The boy wove his own story while looking at my photographs. It had little to do with my original intent, but that delighted me because it meant the work had stimulated an imagination in his mind; it became personal to him.

Delhi is different. It has an incredible arts and cultural ecosystem, but it’s also a city shaped by competition, aggression and survival. Everyone is chasing illusions, with seemingly ever-declining ability for kindness and empathy. Numbness has shrouded most of us. That often affects the way people engage with art. Yet I don’t see things in binaries. Alongside the harshness, I’ve also received immense generosity from senior artists, colleagues and friends.

I have learnt a great deal from artists like Dayanita Singh and Ravi Agarwal. In 2017 or 18, Dayanita welcomed me to stay in her house in Goa for a week with a group of other photographers who were also educators. That was generous. I co-learned in that ecosystem. Over many years, Ravi and I have engaged in conversations around climate, ecology and arts, and my practice has grown through his guidance. I try to pass this on.

MOSAIC: Your work seems to connect three elements— the communities you learn from, the audience you speak to, and your own perspective as an artist. How do you bring these together?

Sharbendu De: I don’t think I ever planned it that way. Looking back, I can see the interconnections, but they emerged organically,  rather than by design. Every stage of my life—from selling products as a teenager, studying journalism, working in disaster response, travelling through the hinterlands, backpacking, living in the forests, and later turning to photography—has shaped my outlook. At the time, they felt like disconnected journeys. Today, I realise they were all preparing me for this practice.

I also believe we should be careful not to burden art with the sole responsibility of creating social change. Art should remain free to explore, experiment and question. Ironically, that freedom often makes it more powerful in
influencing people.

I recently directed an experimental documentary on brick kiln workers in Uttar Pradesh. The commissioning organisation gave me the creative freedom to interpret the subject, while trusting that the social concerns would remain intact. That trust made the work stronger.

Going forward, we need to invest far more in artists working on climate and ecology. We often expect artists to tell these complex stories, yet offer little institutional or societal support, funding or training. Along with artists, museums, galleries, funders and cultural institutions also need to be held accountable. So, if we truly want art to shape climate conversations, we must create the platforms and conditions that
foster criticality.