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"In drawing and photographing the office goers, the unemployed, the petty clerks, the retirees, the ageing and the unglamorous, he announces not just a sentimental bond born out of familiarity but also his loyalty towards those who’ve lost out in the race for success, for whom life must and does go on without unnecessary pathos. This then is his subversion – shifting one’s gaze from odd anecdotes to the blindingly obvious texts of daily life. Unlike Diane Arbus’s violent subversion, Kushal’s is a quiet retelling of a parable that simply can’t be suppressed notwithstanding the assault of contemporaneous fads and so called cultural universalisms. His parting of ways from a diffused Bressonian humanism has landed him closer to Sebastiao Salgado, the Brazilian master, in a shared solidarity with those who must somehow go on living for others to thrive, for whom the truth of life is simple enough – that of struggle borne with patience, humour and guts."
"The knowledge that drives the photographer isn’t simply that of functional family matters, but an ethical and political knowledge.
And the feeling they generate goes beyond sentimentalism into a complex terrain populated by cross currents of intimacies."
"It is clichéd to call these photographs ‘natural’, given the unnatural disregard displayed by the subjects towards the photographer who’d hardly had to creep up to them on his belly like a combat soldier or approach on tiptoes like a pickpocket. Far from being surreptitious images, they are brazen acts, un-negotiated, conducted with full knowledge. It is as if the camera had turned into a mirror requiring no courtesy or apology...."
-- Kunal Basu (Intimacies)
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