Curated by photographer Ram Rahman, the series, titled ‘This Scarred Land: New Mountainscapes’, reflects the changing landscape of the Himalayas by capturing its formative changes. Traditionally revered as dev-bhumi (‘land of the lord’), the Himalayas have carried a sacred connotation and the photographs in question intend to capture the interruption of this normative perception of the mountains by showing how the interface between man and machine has ‘scarred’ the mysticism characteristic of the region.
Unsentimental in approach, the monochromatic photographs subvert the tropes of landscape photography by capturing the Himalayas not through staple angles, but through the terrifying beauty of the depleting natural resources of the region. A revision on 19th century photographer Samuel Bourne’s pristine portraits of the Himalayas, Roy’s photographs veer towards a representation of contemporary India, capturing its rush to development as it is industrially envisioned. The images capture the losing battle between the trees, rocks, rivers and other constitutive elements of the landscape with industrial invasion through the intervention of another powerful technology- the still camera.