April 2025 Self-published First Edition Softcover, Handbound 210 x 148 mm, 66 pages English Edition of 50
The zine is the third in a series examining the Yamuna River through parodic scientific investigation.
"The work emerged from measuring bridge pillars across the stretch of the Yamuna floodplain in Delhi. I adopted the language and procedures of technical fieldwork, complete with apparatus lists, safety instructions, and methodological protocols, to create what appears to be a training manual for amateur photographers. But the enterprise is fundamentally absurd. The obsessive repetition of identical instructions, the bureaucratic labelling of each "observation" and "evidence image," the performative gestures of wrapping measuring tape with "constant tension". All of this exposes how readily scientific language can authorise meaningless activity. I'm interested in how photography participates in these systems of measurement and control, how it lends credibility to dubious projects through its documentary (deadpan) appearance.
"By casting myself as both surveyor and photographer, I collapse two modes of authority into a single comic figure. The pillars themselves become sculptural objects subjected to elaborate measurement tasks, an infrastructure treated with the seriousness typically reserved for landscape or geological phenomena. The mock elaborate performance mimics the institutional procedures while revealing their theatrical nature." - Kush Kukreja
