Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant for Photography 2023

Pretika Menon is a photographer based in Goa. She has worked as a photographer and creative director in the fields of fashion and visual-arts for more than a decade.

Pretika has been featured in Proud South, a global index by the Dutch trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort on trends in fashion and culture in the Southern Hemisphere. Her work has been published in Kidz Paris 2022, an art book that focuses on 50 young creatives across the globe. The book is curated and art-directed by Raphaëlle Bellanger and Anna Gardère.

She was selected in Condenast’s talent hunt in Mumbai in 2019 to feature her work in Vogue Italia and is a regular contributor to the publication since then. Her work has been featured and published in major fashion publications in India including Vogue India, Harper’s Bazaar, Verve, Grazia, Platform, Say Zine to name a few. In 2022 Pretika participated in a residency supported by Vogue Italia to create her first collection of NFTS on the platform VOICE.

Pretika has received the 2023 PhMuseum Women Photographers Grant. She was selected for the Angkor Wat Photo-Workshop in January 2024 in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She is currently working on a group exhibition for her project titled Dhon (Two).

Vamika Jain is an artist and designer working primarily with photography. She pursued Master of Design in Photography from National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar and completed her Bachelor of Architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. As an exchange student, with scholarship from the Goethe-Institut, she attended Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig, Germany in 2017.

A mix of photography, text and video, her work explores ontology of the image and space- their forms, representation and hierarchy through the perspective of different human identities amid the evolving trends in politics, media, technology and data society. With her work, she intends to deconstruct the existing forms of visual representation. Vamika is the recipient of Space Studio Baroda’s Artist Grant, Experimenter’s Generator Grant and NID-MNF award for outstanding project rooted in social, cultural and political inquiries and was selected for a mentorship program and grant by VII Academy and Pathshala South Asia Media Institute.

Jury Statement

It has become commonplace to open a jury statement with a general diagnosis of the state of photography.  But of course, the state of photography is always crisis, always transition, always under threat, always at a pivotal moment. We can take this for granted. There has been no moment when photography was not troubled, technically, artistically, socially, philosophically.

It is much less commonplace to hear the positive side of the diagnosis. Looking at the submissions for this grant it became very clear that a great deal of exciting and important photographic work is being made in contemporary India. The range of ways in which the image is being engaged is extraordinarily wide and ambitious… despite the permanent crisis.

The age range of the photographers is also wide. We have received submissions from established practitioners with decades of professional experience. We have received submissions from students, recent graduates and young photographers, often entirely self-taught, working far away from the country’s traditional centres of art and culture. We have had submissions from image makers working in well established genres and idioms, and from experimenters finding the form for what they are doing in the midst of doing it.

The purpose of this grant is to give  support to projects which are already showing great potential but are in need of vital help. It’s not a grant to kickstart brand new projects, nor to put the icing on the cake for projects that are already completed. So, what we were looking for, more than anything, was promise.  Those vital signs and green shoots that appear when an original and ambitious direction begins to take form. This is always a delicate moment, when excitement is often tempered by doubt in the face of life’s realities. Will there be time to pursue the work? Will there be resources? Will there be finances? And, just as importantly, in the sometimes dark and lonely days of bringing a project into the world, will there be any voices of support and affirmation? The Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant aims to offer all of these.

To administrate a grant such as this requires a dedicated team. We would like to thank them all for their hard work, which has helped the duties of the jury to run so smoothly.

We would also like to thank all those dedicated image makers who submitted their work. It was a pleasure to see it all, and we wish you well with your projects.

The standard of work we looked at was high, and we deliberated over three days. From a long list of eleven projects, we came down to four, and from these four there are, firstly, two photographers deserving of an honourable mention.

Anupam Diwan, for his beautifully measured and attentive documentation of the town of Tilda. These black and white photographs, slow and absorbing, are the result of a mature and dedicated vision.

Avijit Ghosh, for his experimental documentary response to the precarious lives of people on the islands of Sundarbans. Addressing both the material conditions of the people, and the materiality of photography itself, Avijit Ghosh closes the gap between the image and the world it expresses.

The two winners of this year’s Umrao Singh Sher-Gil Grant are:

Pretika Menon, for her project Dhon (Two), which promises to be a profound and poetic exploration of her relationship with a family she met by chance and the twin sisters at its heart. With a delicate balance of documentary description and gentle surrealism, Pretika Menon’s poetic vision is sure to blossom into something very special

Vamika Jain, for I Travel Therefore I Am, for her wittily subversive engagement with the role of the image in the commodification of our visual culture. We live in strange times, and Vamika Jain’s response, full of absurdist humour, sly montage and satirical words feels like the art these times deserve.