"But people aren't so one-dimensional. Distilling their lives and experiences through the flash of a camera distills their humanity, too. That's a fact that's never sat well with Ashima Yadavanot when she was growing up in New Delhi, India, not after she moved to San Francisco to further her education, not when she was a Director's Fellow in Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2020."
"Some added color to the black-and-white pictures, others corrected mistakes or added elements that were not actually there. In one portrait, a basketball player corrected the record by drawing a ball in their own hands after the camera's flash captured the real one in the hands of their sibling. It was a perfect metaphor for the project, says Yadava. All of these stories are also enriched because they directly included the voices of the people that were in them."
"Currently on exhibit at Chung 24 Gallery, Yadava's Front Yard series doesn't just illuminate the experiences of families across socio-economic classes and ethnic backgrounds in those early days of Covid uncertainty; it illustrates the nuances and dichotomies of those experiences in a way a camera alone could never capture."
Ashima Yadava photographed families quarantining in their front yards at the start of the pandemic and then handed the prints back to those families to modify. Families added color, corrected perceived mistakes, and introduced elements that reflected their own perspectives, altering black-and-white images into collaborative artifacts. One subject drew a basketball to correct what the camera captured. The process foregrounded participants' voices and produced layered, nuanced portraits that bridge socio-economic and ethnic differences. The Front Yard series examines how photographic representation can be expanded through direct participation and imaginative revision by its subjects.
Read at www.7x7.com
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