stars waiting for main lights to come on (set of “rok sako to rok lo”)

rafil kroll-zaidi
born: New Delhi, India
Currently resides in New York, New York

work statement
I took four years of silver-process photography in high school in Austin, Texas; this was with minimal structure, and the approach I developed was unselfconscious, spontaneous, and intuitive—based on capturing decisive and ephemeral moments. At Princeton University, my technique grew more formal and deliberate. Under the guidance of the photographer Andrew Moore, I moved into color, aiming for painterly richness in my photographs.

In 2003 I was awarded Princeton’s Daniel M. Sachs Memorial Scholarship for my proposal to pursue a one-year independent project in the Bollywood film industry. I lived in Bombay for the year and worked on the sets of a number of different feature films. My aim was to create images that were enlivened by the color and iconography of mainstream Indian cinema while manipulating framing, juxtapositions and angles that removed the subjects from their contexts, rendered them ambiguous, and suggested alternate narratives that were sometimes drastically distinct from the original films in production.

During my final six weeks in India, I undertook an intensive large-format study of Bombay landscapes and scenes of daily life. I wanted to produce images that would resonate with and enrich the Bollywood material. Having already immersed myself in the bright, colorful fantasies of Bombay’s cinema, I sought to capture an equally strong and specifically cinematic sense of drama in the city itself. These scenes suggest a feeling of biographical time from which memory flows, whereas the photos from the film sets appear more spectral and insubstantial.

I am drawn to the work of Edward Burtynsky, Andrew Moore, Robert Polidori and Joel Sternfeld; all of them combine consummate technical skill with an ability to create evocative, sensuous images. My ideal subjects are landscapes composed of living people; both stylistically and in terms of my subject choice, I aim for that which possesses eeriness and austerity–-or which can be transformed into something eerie and austere.

bio
Rafil Kroll-Zaidi was born in New Delhi, and he lived in northern India until he was five. When his mother (who is American) and his father (who is Indian) separated, he moved to America with his mother and lived in Iowa from 1986 until 1989 and then in Austin, Texas from 1989 until 1999, when he finished high school. (He also used to spend about three months of every year in India.) He went to Princeton University, where he majored in Comparative Literature and extensively pursued the critical study and practice of the visual arts. After college, he spent fourteen months on a postgraduate fellowship in Bombay and London. He has also studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Camberwell School of the arts, both of which are in London, and at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He recently accepted a position as an assistant editor of Harper’s Magazine.  Rafil Kroll-Zaidi resides in New York City.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 9:50 am by Jen Bekman Gallery and is filed under hey hot shot!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.