Rahul Pardasani
Portraits and street pictures, mostly from India and mostly from the early years of practice. Something over 100,000 frames taken since, and more than 5,000 given away, mostly portraits. I have never kept a portfolio, so this is not a curated selection: just pictures I stumbled back into.
About
“I have never taken a picture for any other reason than that at that moment it made me happy to do so.”
Jacques-Henri Lartigue
That is about right for me too. I take pictures because I like taking pictures. Sometimes there is a story and often there is not, and the framing is simply interesting. The joy roughly doubles when I get to give the picture away afterwards.
What is gathered here is portraits and street pictures, made in India between 2010 and 2014. It is not the whole of the work. I shoot documentary, I shoot while travelling, and a lot of what I photograph is nature, landscape and fairly mundane things. Instagram carries the rest. I slowed down after moving to Finland, where people are more reserved, and have shot ad hoc since, for myself.
I picked up a camera in 2010 and the identity arrived with it, mostly because people started calling me a photographer. Giving the pictures away is the part I care about. I have shot weddings and commercial work and enjoyed neither, so I take none now. Lately the subject is often my dogs.
I have been privileged enough to travel to 40 or so countries. There is no pile of heavy equipment: some frames are made on a phone, some on a Hasselblad, and I try not to follow a curated aesthetic.
I live in Espoo. Indian, studied in the UK, came into media and social impact work through photography, then pivoted to the social sciences, moved to Finland to study, and have worked in tech since 2014. This site is not kept up to date; Instagram is the living version.
Work & credits
Almost all of the India work runs from 2010 to 2014.
- Official photographer on Jagriti Yatra, a fifteen-day, 8,000 km train journey that carries several hundred young people the length of India to meet the people building enterprises there. Photographs from those journeys went into the organisation's own library.India
- Part of the early team that started YES! i am the CHANGE, a social filmmaking challenge for young people across India. It grew into something far larger, running five editions and reaching more than 200,000 participants.India
- Following the Kabir Yatras in Rajasthan and Malwa, the folk music pilgrimages documented by The Kabir ProjectRajasthan & Madhya Pradesh
- Work with the Gandhi Ashram at SabarmatiAhmedabad
- Work with ServiceSpaceVolunteer
- Work with the Environmental Sanitation InstituteGujarat
- Work with Moved by LoveVolunteer
- Work with the community at Seva Cafe, the gift-economy kitchenAhmedabad
- Trained the photography and product team at Craftroots in its early days, and set up their in-house studioAhmedabad
- Early photography projects supporting Gramshree TrustAhmedabad
- Photographs credited in The New York Times, Helsinki Times and The Times of IndiaPress
- Education is a Human Right, exhibited across the Helsinki and Vantaa campuses by METKA, the Student Union of Metropolia2014
- Sanskriti, a photography exhibition I put together and showed locallyAhmedabad, 2010
A small client portfolio over the years
Professional work on the side: workshops, commissions and pro bono projects, gathered here in one place.