Love & Other Hurts

Love & Other Hurts attempts to paint a psychological map of the lives and experiences of women of Punjabi origin in the West Midlands (UK) and their Indian counterparts. It draws upon accounts of love and longing, family bonds and cultural traditions to highlight their struggle to survive in often very challenging circumstances. What emerges in the work is a complex picture of life in diaspora communities and amongst family members in India that speaks of courage and resilience, bonds of love and friendship, but correspondingly of hardship, loneliness, abandonment and depression.

The challenges of emigrating cannot be understated. Leaving home and settling into a different culture poses many challenges to one’s sense of identity, belonging, and community. These are compounded for women who are born into value systems that already impose restrictions on their lives. This is certainly true for many British-Punjabi women. For them, it is love and other hurts that define their stories.

The multiple exposure technique used for making many of the images builds a subjective narrative, blurring boundaries between location, time, fact and fiction, interlacing individual stories with accounts from literature, archival and other found material. However, what defines this work is the participation of the subjects in the image-making process. I have given analogue films to a handful of British Punjabi women to shoot what they would like to share of their lives, over which I have photographed my impressions based on extensive interviews with them, often reshooting the films in the Punjab not knowing what was previously photographed by them. What comes to the surface are serendipitous elements and surreal connections, conveying the complexities of the lives lived between two cultures.