Photographer Kushal Ray is a curator of the times—of then and now. His acute sensibility goes beyond fleeting encounters and turns strangers into his own and his own into strangers. This metamorphosis is steeped in years of trust and intimacy with people and families. His exhibition at the Kolkata Centre for Creativity, No One is a Stranger, showcases the strong familial bonds Ray had developed with two households—one in remote Ladakh and the other in Kolkata, where Ray lives.
“My emphasis is on intimate human relationships; I love to read literature around it. It inspires me. I love to fraternise with various people,” he says.
Ray’s photography is deeply personal—an emotional autobiography told through images of others. “I document families not as an outsider, but as someone who belongs, using my camera to explore love, memory, and the passage of time. Inspired by photographers like Dayanita Singh, I turned my lens toward a Bengali family I was deeply connected to, believing that love and empathy—not blood—create real belonging,” he says.
His work blurs the line between subject and photographer, capturing the quiet intimacy of everyday life. Through this, Ray aims to show that with trust and care, even cultivated relationships can hold the depth and tenderness of inherited ones. His images are reflections of his own place in the world and a reminder that no one is truly a stranger.
His photo collection titled Intimacies is a peek into the lives and deaths of a joint Bengali family. Rooms crammed with belongings, lives shared in closed, claustrophobic homes, and the warmth of human connections are the subjects that Ray captures with tenderness. His work “explores relationships and intimacies that the members enjoyed among themselves”. In these black and white photos, we witness life. A little girl seen in many frames has blossomed into a young woman. The house she grew up in doesn’t exist anymore.
Intimate and deeply personal as these frames may be, they are not voyeuristic, for Ray is empathic with his subjects. “If there is ever a false move, my subjects would figure out immediately,” he says. His collection on the life in Ladakh began when Ray first visited there as a young reporter. A playful use of light in the photographs of both Kolkata and Ladakh is evident. In Kolkata, sunlight scarcely visits the cloistered rooms, whereas the craggy Ladakh landscape is brightly lit. Yet in both the settings, light acts as an intimate companion of the subjects, much like Ray himself.