In 2017, I began working on stories about blindness in India. Motivated by my colourblindness and the stories I covered as a journalist, I started visiting a school for the visually impaired in Calcutta. Here I met Rima, Ashraful, and Brihaspati, students who came to the city to pursue education from faraway villages of West Bengal.
As our friendships deepened, I started realising how different our lived experiences had been. I could never understand the effects of the stigma and prejudice they faced on a day-to-day basis, especially in their villages. Their dreams, aspirations, and struggles were very different from mine. The dichotomy between the lives I photographed and my own became too pronounced.
In the following years, I collaborated with these young learners. Together, we developed a photographic work titled “The Mysterious Forest,” a series of images exploring a fictional story written by Ashraful, inspired by one of his recurring dreams. In this story, a boy loses his way inside a forest and meets a forest spirit and go on adventures together. In the photographic enactment, Ashraful played the role of the lost boy while Rima embodied the character of the forest spirit.
The Mysterious Forest captures the fears, hopes, and fantasies of adolescents living with visual disabilities, aiming to facilitate their self-expression, inspire sensitivity, and challenge the stigma and stereotypes surrounding blindness in the region.
As our friendships deepened, I started realising how different our lived experiences had been. I could never understand the effects of the stigma and prejudice they faced on a day-to-day basis, especially in their villages. Their dreams, aspirations, and struggles were very different from mine. The dichotomy between the lives I photographed and my own became too pronounced.
In the following years, I collaborated with these young learners. Together, we developed a photographic work titled “The Mysterious Forest,” a series of images exploring a fictional story written by Ashraful, inspired by one of his recurring dreams. In this story, a boy loses his way inside a forest and meets a forest spirit and go on adventures together. In the photographic enactment, Ashraful played the role of the lost boy while Rima embodied the character of the forest spirit.
The Mysterious Forest captures the fears, hopes, and fantasies of adolescents living with visual disabilities, aiming to facilitate their self-expression, inspire sensitivity, and challenge the stigma and stereotypes surrounding blindness in the region.
Over the course of three years, I mentored these young learners as they made photographs with point-and-shoot film cameras, using their senses of touch, smell, and sound, as well as their familiarity with their surroundings. Later, these images were converted into tactile prints, making Rima and Ashraful’s work accessible to people living with visual disabilities, including, of course, their creators.
In December 2019, with the Research and Exploration Grant from the National Geographic Society, we held a four day pop-up exhibition at their village in Erenda, West Bengal. Across four days, more than 500 visitors viewed our work and listened to the students speak about their experiences. The exhibition inspired dialogue about disability in a community where the disabled are ostracised.
