Intimacies / Antarangata by Kushal Ray

1st Edition (2026)
Hardcover
Bilingual - English and Bengali
120 pages
Published by Mandas Publications
ISBN: 9789347547898

Intimacies is a deeply personal photographic exploration by Kushal Ray that chronicles the everyday life of an extended middle-class family living in Kolkata’s Kalighat neighbourhood. Developed over nearly a decade beginning in 1998, the project documents the Chatterjee family across four generations sharing an 85-year-old ancestral home. Ray’s position as an “insider–outsider”—a close friend who lived with the family for several years—allowed him to witness moments of affection, conflict, care, illness, and eventual disintegration. The photographs reveal the fragile yet resilient intimacies that sustained the joint family system at a time when nuclear households were becoming dominant in urban India. At the emotional centre of the work is Manju Chatterjee, a philosophy teacher whose intellectual companionship and personal support profoundly shaped Ray’s artistic journey. Both documentary and autobiographical, Intimacies reflects on memory, kinship, and the passage of time through a compassionate photographic gaze.