Tanmay Shah | Photographic Nights of Selma Festival - Photo festival - Alabama

Back to all photogtapher 2026 edition

Tanmay Shah

« Borrowed Earth: What We Stop Seeing »

Biography:

Tanmay Shah is a filmmaker, photographer and painter based in Ahmedabad, India. He has worked across documentary film, photography and painting for more than a decade, and founded the production company FridayFictionFilms in 2014.

His photographs have been shown in two solo exhibitions at Amdavad ni Gufa, Ahmedabad: Concoct (2017), and Borrowed Earth (31 March to 6 April 2026), where his photographs and paintings were shown together to 1,515 visitors. In August 2026 he presented Borrowed Earth in a UNESCO Art for Earth: Climate Creativity Lab webinar, and the project was featured on UNESCO.org later that month.

His documentary work includes the short documentary Pinch of Salt (2016), about salt workers in the Little Rann of Kutch, and the feature documentary Sand Hogs (2022), selected at the 12th National Science Film Festival of India. He is currently making Salt Under the Sun, a feature documentary about Agariya salt families in the Little Rann of Kutch. He also created the 52FilmsProject (2015), a series of 52 short fiction films recorded in the Limca Book of Records.

He teaches short filmmaking at Ahmedabad University and CEPT University.

India

https://www.fridayfictionfilms.in/

https://www.instagram.com/looienmogen

Borrowed Earth: What We Stop Seeing

Eighteen photographs, made between 2018 and 2023 in India, Sri Lanka and the United States, follow the ordinary arrangements through which people live alongside animals, water, land and cities. The sequence moves from contact to distance.

It begins close. In Amritsar, a hand reaches into water and a fish meets it. In Varanasi, a cow stands inside a cloth shop between mannequins; in California, a cow walks along a path bordered by dry grass. Back in Varanasi, people, boats and stalls share the riverbank, and in Amritsar the Golden Temple is doubled in the water around it at night.

The middle of the series turns to work and settlement. Fishing boats crowd a harbour in Sri Lanka. A houseboat sits moored on still water in Kerala. Tea bushes in Munnar are shaped into rows, and the town of Darjeeling climbs its ridge beneath the Kanchenjunga range. A train crosses a stone viaduct through forest in Sri Lanka, and in Jaisalmer a rider leaves through a lit stone passage.

From here, figures grow smaller and the space around them larger. In a monastery courtyard in Sikkim, a pillar's shadow is longer than the two people standing at its edge. In New York, towers appear only as shadows on the water, and the skyline turns upside down inside a glass sphere. Over Seattle, a single trail of light crosses the night sky. On a lake shore in Sikkim, a group of figures shrinks to specks beneath a reflected slope, and in Alaska the aurora moves above a snow-covered shelter. The series ends in Jaisalmer, where one person on a stone ledge photographs an almost empty sky.

The photographs shift between close encounters and wider views, moving attention from individual gestures to the spaces around them. Animals, buildings, boats and people share these places, sometimes comfortably and sometimes unexpectedly. In projection, I want the sequence to slow gradually, moving from the crowded scenes of the opening toward the larger stretches of water and sky at its end.

These photographs were exhibited alongside my paintings in Borrowed Earth, a solo exhibition at Amdavad ni Gufa, Ahmedabad (31 March to 6 April 2026).