A Dream Villa photographer exchanged her dowry to study photography in America in 1988.

On her return to India, she met a very unique eunuch in Old Delhi and 13 years later, they made Myself Mona Ahmed. Mona wrote her life story in the form of e-mails to the Scalo publisher, Walter Keller. The book was released by the Swiss ambassador in the graveyard where Mona now lives.

In 1999, she returned to the Mystic’s ashram in Varanasi where her father had wanted her to live and study. Some years after his and the mystics passing away, she made I am as I am. Years later this became one of the 7 accordion-fold books Sent a Letter in 2008.

Even the family portraits she made as Privacy in 2003 felt constrictive. She longed for more space, she explored Empty Spaces. Her terrain expanded and years later, she found colour, more specifically a blue of daylight film used after sunset.  In 2008 she made Blue Book, a set of 23 postcards.

During her travels and conversations with Prof. Tungabhadra she chanced upon this poppy moment. She recognised the emotion, she had been there before. She returned to her contact sheets, and made Go Away Closer with Gerhard Steidl in 2007.

And then came the terror of the night. She had crossed over to the other side. Nothing was as it seemed to be, the world was topsy-turvy and the moon was just the night’s ornament. The landscape existed in her head, it had no geography, she never knew where in the world it would present itself, or when she would meet its inhabitants. But when she encountered them, she recognised them instantly. In 2010 this ‘nocturnal vacation’ turned into Dream Villa.

Why does it matter where she made this picture? What does the location satisfy except your curiosity? The where and when of photography are constricting, as is the question of who made the picture, Indian eyes or Swiss ones? It’s boring.

“I fall into a place and I become of that place,” replied Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak when asked, during a public conversation in Calcultta, whether she would describe herself as cosmopolitan. “I feel sometimes, when someone asks me the question, that I have roots in air. You know? I am at home everywhere and I am not at home anywhere.  It seems to me when one is at home, the place where one is at home has no name.”