Ghar
Anu Kumar
Perimeter Editions
English, Hindi
Hardcover
First Edition of 800
136 pages
140 x 180 mm
2022
ISBN 9781922545114
Ideas around place and identity have never been unequivocal for Anu Kumar. When the young Melbourne-based photographer returned to to her birthplace of Kavi Nagar, India, for the first time since childhood at age twenty-one, she felt at sea. ‘I remember a feeling of discomfort, of not knowing my place or who I was in that context,’ she says. ‘I began taking photos as an exercise in learning how to be Indian.’
The term Ghar, meaning ‘home’ in Hindi, doubles as the title of this, her debut book, and the broader outcome of her pursuit – one that is as much a new beginning as it is a homecoming. Shooting over a period of five years on a medium format camera, Kumar’s soft gaze meanders between the rooms and courtyards of the family home in Kavi Nagar, and out onto the neighbouring streets, sketching out the symbolic and aesthetic markers of a personal and cultural heritage. Formal portraits of her grandmother, aunts and uncles, echoing the traditional family album, give way to intimate scenes of daily tasks and quiet idleness – a thorough visual record to preserve intergenerational gestures and familial rituals that may otherwise linger in the undocumented everyday.
Kumar’s search for familial closeness was suddenly given a new sense of universality when the COVID-19 pandemic closed Australia’s international borders for almost two years. Edited and sequenced during this period, Ghar also speaks to the enforced distance experienced by cross-cultural families, and the role of photographs as vessels for intimacy and connection. The series contemplates ‘home’ in all its multiplicities. A place, a sentiment, a responsibility; something at once inherently familiar and other times distant and incongruous.
(source: https://www.thelibraryproject.ie/collections/photobooks/products/ghar-anu-kumar?_pos=1&_sid=6c26ce111&_ss=r)
About the Artist
Anu Kumar (she/her) is a photographic artist living and working in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Working primarily with medium format photography, she interrogates themes of displacement and the diaspora, using her practice as a gateway to understanding her identity as a woman born in India and raised in Australia. Through her work, Kumar strives to archive the quotidian expressions of everyday life as an examination of self, family and belonging. Her photography has been featured in the New York Times and Vogue, and exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (2022), and The National Gallery of Victoria (2023) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (2024).
Kumar released her first monograph “Ghar” with Perimeter Editions, which was shortlisted for the Paris Photo- Aperture First Photobook award (2023), and winner of the Australian & New Zealand Photobook awards (2024).
anukumar.com.au
(source: https://anukumar.com.au/INFO)
About the Publisher
Perimeter Editions is the award-winning publishing imprint of Melbourne-based bookstore Perimeter Books and distribution house Perimeter Distribution. Releasing its first publication in 2012, Perimeter Editions’ focus rests on publishing autonomous books in close collaboration with photographers, artists, curators and writers. Its publications exhibit a criticality and sensitivity to content and form.
perimetereditions.com
(source: https://perimetereditions.com/filter/Izabela-Pluta/About)
