Kalpesh Lathigra dissects family history in Mumbai solo exhibition

For the last few years, Kalpesh Lathigra's work has moved around ideas of home and belonging, mostly to test where it breaks down. Mémoire Temporelle began as a way of walking Mumbai with his family history in mind: tracing his grandfather's route from Gujarat to Bombay, then on to Nairobi and London, while trying (and not quite managing) to answer the question of 'home.' It's a project that carries the pull of memory, but it also pushes back against easy nostalgia by admitting fiction and the fact that his gaze has been shaped by a Euro-American photographic education.

His first solo exhibition in India, The Lives We Dream in Passing, gathers the full trilogy: Mémoire Temporelle; The Indian Photo Studio (a box of found studio portraits, faces staring out from unknown lives); and Junagadh, his father's hometown, where streets and hotel rooms become charged spaces of looking. The exhibition pulls together photographs that already existed separately, but something has shifted. He's more certain about his position now, and he's stopped trying to smooth it out.

Seen together, the work feels settled not because it offers answers, but because Lathigra is clearer about where he stands inside it. 'What feels settled is an understanding of me,' he says. 'The chaotic energy in my head, the photographs as a kind of symphony.' Over time, his attention moved away from negotiating identity and towards trusting his own responses as an artist. That clarity came into focus in the hotel rooms of Junagadh. He's long been drawn to hotels as spaces where he can be alone and anonymous. Neither India nor the UK, the room sits outside fixed categories. While there, reading Letters to a Young Poet, he was drawn to Rilke's idea of solitude as strength and the need to 'embrace the difficult.' He looked around the room and, as he puts it, 'the realisation of who I am at heart and what position I hold as an individual hit me.'

From inside, often at height and using a basic point-and-shoot camera, Lathigra began photographing the street below. The limitations of the camera and the distance of the view mattered. 'It allowed me to be a voyeur,' he says. Looking through windows, he became aware not only of gestures unfolding outside, but of his own act of looking. Only later did he find language for it. When he came across the idea of positionality, it felt less like a theory and more like a name for what he'd already been doing. 'The window, the height, that distance represented a kind of divorce,' he says. 'Once I realised that, I leaned into it.'

Importantly, that distance is not treated as something to overcome. Moving away from photojournalism's fixation on access and immersion, Lathigra resists the idea that proximity equals authenticity. The separation in these images is deliberate; the work doesn't try to disguise the fact that it's made by someone who grew up in Forest Gate, London, and carries that history with him.

Back on the street, the work changes register. It's no longer about the elevated view from above, but about being on the ground with a gaze that remains, unavoidably, shaped elsewhere. The work originally carried the working title A Point of Departure, inspired by thoughts of his father leaving India and the lives that followed. Being there again wasn't about reclaiming a place. 'It's an arrival,' he says, 'but validated in myself.' The photographs acknowledge the Euro-American influences that shape how he sees, without apology. 'The water you drink is you,' he says, pointing to the ways education, reference and experience quietly assert themselves. He cites Joachim Brohm's Ohio as a work that resonated deeply – not as a template, but as confirmation that a way of seeing is always formed by where you've been.

Across the exhibition, many images remain partially obscured or hard to pin down. In one, a car interior breaks apart in reflection, inside and outside collapsing together. In another, palms dissolve into haze. For Lathigra, that uncertainty is central. 'Opacity is everything,' he says. To explain too much would close the work down. Meaning is left open, unfixed.

The Lives We Dream in Passing does not aim for closure. Junagadh, Lathigra suggests, remains unfinished – he's thinking about going back with his father, who turns 80 this year. A road trip, maybe, to close something out. For now, what's offered is a photographer's way of seeing: shaped by contradictions, comfortable with distance, resistant to resolution. Lathigra's not trying to arrive anywhere. He's showing what it looks like to accept where you're standing.

'The Lives We Dream in Passing' is at NCPA (National Centre for Performing Arts) Photography Gallery, MUMBAI until 3 March 2026

ncpamumbai.com

Cindy Parthonnaud is photo editor, agent and consultant, with a focus on fashion, portraiture, still life, beauty and interiors. Working across commissioning and artist representation, she has previously held photo editor roles at publications including The Times LUXX and WIRED. She is the founder of Sidelines Studio, a consultancy supporting photographers with strategic guidance and long-term career development.