Emami Art will present A Few Things To See Along the Way: Kushal Ray’s Calcutta, Ladakh, and Home, an exhibition of photographs by Kolkata-based photographer Kushal Ray, at Museo Camera Centre for the Photographic Arts in Gurugram from 5 to 22 November 2026. The exhibition brings together three bodies of work developed over several decades, exploring family relationships, everyday life in Calcutta and communities in Ladakh through Ray’s sustained engagement with his subjects.
Four Decades of Documentary Photography
Born in Calcutta in 1960, Ray began his professional career as a sports journalist at The Telegraph in 1982. He developed an interest in photography while producing photo essays for the newspaper and left journalism in 1991 to work as an independent photographer. His practice is characterised by returning to the same people and places over extended periods, allowing familiarity and trust to shape the resulting images. His work has been exhibited in India and internationally, including at the British Museum in London in 2014. Emami Art’s artist biography documents his career across photography and painting.
Three Bodies of Work, One Approach
The exhibition brings together Intimacies (1998–2009), Ladakh: A Syncretic Living (1987–2017) and photographs of Calcutta taken between 1990 and 1993. Together, the projects reflect Ray’s interest in the connections between people, their surroundings and the passage of time. Rather than concentrating on isolated moments, the photographs emerge from repeated encounters and extended observation.
The presentation is described as the widest showing of Ray’s work in the Delhi region. It follows the artist’s 2026 exhibition শহরনামা | Calcutta 1990–1993 at Emami Art in Kolkata, which brought selections from his largely unprinted early-1990s city archive before the public.
Intimacies: A Family Over Eleven Years
The exhibition presents Intimacies in its entirety as a set of 44 prints. Beginning in 1998, Ray photographed a joint family of ten living in a roughly 90-year-old house with 12 rooms in Kolkata. Over more than a decade, he produced approximately 8,000 photographs documenting domestic routines, relationships, ageing and illness.
Ray’s established friendship with the family allowed him to photograph ordinary moments within the household, including interactions between generations. The project became a photobook published by Niyogi Books in 2012, featuring an essay by author Kunal Basu. Photographer Dayanita Singh nominated the book for a photobook award at Le Bal in Paris that year, and a second edition was subsequently published by Mandas Publications.
Ladakh Through Three Decades
In Ladakh: A Syncretic Living, Ray documents families and everyday life in the Himalayan region over a period spanning 1987 to 2017. His repeated visits followed households across generations, recording changes in family life alongside the social and cultural fabric of the region.
The photographs depict Ladakh as an inhabited and evolving place, with Buddhist and Muslim communities sharing public spaces and daily experiences. The series grew out of the journeys that led to Ray’s first solo photography exhibition, Everyday Life of an Exotic Land, at Piramal Gallery, NCPA, Mumbai, in 1998. One photograph from his Ladakh work is held in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
Calcutta: An Archive Revisited
The Calcutta photographs date from 1990 to 1993, when Ray walked through the city regularly, revisiting tram stops, markets and river ghats. During this period, he exposed more than 260 rolls of film in 1991 alone, often working with borrowed film and limited resources. Much of the material remained unprinted for more than three decades.
A selection was first presented by Emami Art in Kolkata in 2026. The Museo Camera exhibition offers another opportunity to encounter these photographs, which record the city’s everyday life during a period of change.
Venue, Dates and Visitor Information
The exhibition will be held in the First Floor Galleries at Museo Camera Centre for the Photographic Arts, Shri Ganesh Mandir Marg, Sector 28, DLF Phase IV, Gurugram, Haryana 122009. The preview is scheduled for 5 November 2026, and the exhibition runs through 22 November.
| Event | Detail |
|---|---|
| Event Name | A Few Things To See Along the Way: Kushal Ray’s Calcutta, Ladakh, and Home |
| Artist | Kushal Ray |
| Venue | First Floor Galleries, Museo Camera Centre for the Photographic Arts, Shri Ganesh Mandir Marg, Sector 28, DLF Phase IV, Gurugram, Haryana 122009 |
| Preview | 5 November 2026 |
| Exhibition Dates | 5–22 November 2026 |
| Organiser | Emami Art |
| Timings | 11:00 AM–7:00 PM, Tuesday to Sunday; closed on Mondays |
| Website / Registration | Emami Art – Exhibition Details | Museo Camera Official Website |
Photography as a Record of Shared Life
By bringing together photographs made across Calcutta, Ladakh and a family home, the exhibition examines how sustained observation can document both personal relationships and wider social histories. Ray’s work offers visitors an opportunity to consider the role of trust, memory and everyday experience in documentary photography. It also contributes to conversations about photographic archives and how images preserve changing communities and places for future audiences.
