overexposed fragments of moments. a part of a project for college, to show a part of my memory. here are the outtakes from the dorm room photoshoot starring my roommate abby.

it’s a warm, high school, september day. i usually brought my camera in to school everyday, and then took it out at lunch and just began to shoot. it was good practice and it captured memories that would otherwise be lost somewhere in my mind. i ate lunch with two of my closest friends, meaghan and jacky. i have hundreds of pictures from days just like this, where we all simply hung out and had fun and i attempted to capture it with my dad’s used canon. this is one of my favorite lunch shoots. it’s sunny and bright and goofy and everything that encompasses those lunchtime photoshoots.

a grainy, old bollywood-esque capture of one of the biggest milestones in an artist’s life: her arangetram. these are memories, screenshots to look back at in reverence and reminisce. i attempted to craft an old film reel of sorts. this is an artistic documentation that heightens every characteristic of the event—and the photograph—within its vintage personality and endearing candor.

my good friend, sravya tanikella, had her carnatic vocal arangetram (a program in which she continuously sings alone for a number of hours with accompanying musicians on the mridangam, violin, etc.) this june. i had the privilege to take the pictures they used in the program brochure and the invitations. these are the culminating photographs from that sunny, fun-filled saturday afternoon with everyone gathered in the living room while she sat prim and poised in her langa voni with two white bedsheets as our diy background.

one of my friends, cole senatore, is an incredible musician. his music is beyond words. i am lucky to call him a friend and am lucky to have had the opportunity to photograph his first concert, stargazers. it was in the school auditorium (that also acts as a cafeteria during breakfast and lunch periods) and the stage wasn’t grand. there were no risers or FX technology save for the lights—done by another classmate and close friend bella—and cole’s self-made visuals. it was beautiful. it was spectacular. even when his visuals glitched and he had to shut off the computer, his music alone and bella’s lights were enough to transcend this world and leave everyone wide-eyed and starstruck.

i had never done concert photography before. it was new experience, one i wasn’t entirely as prepared for as i should’ve been. but it was one of the best experiences of my life. it was beauty in all its glory. it was instrumental magic. i hadn’t come prepared for lighting and since the visuals cut off halfway through, i ended up working in a much darker environment than i anticipated. so i only ended up with three photographs. but i meant to capture cole, in his element, transforming the stage into something ethereal. and i hope i did.

a shower is a vulnerable place; you strip to the bare naked, you wash away anything unwanted lingering on your skin or in your mind, you forget the world for a minute and exist solely underneath the cascading water and thick, soapy air. it is where you are you, without limitations. sometimes you sing, sometimes you practice conversations, sometimes you imagine someone else in there with you, sometimes you simply close your eyes and breathe.

i wanted to take that away and see what happened, what it looked like. i asked my friend, meaghan, to be the subject. she’s a simple girl in the photos; fully clothed, with slightly smudged makeup, plainly sitting in the bathtub. the setting is still raw, the subject still naked, but not explicitly. i took away the physical privacy, using the camera’s flash and having the curtains drawn away so that she’s fully revealed in her soaked t-shirt and shorts. but i tried to keep the intimacy of the moment, the vulnerability of the girl. yes, she’s wearing clothes, but her face, her body language is enough of a prying truth.

it was an experiment. a cool new photography project that i wanted to bring to life. just to try it out and see what came of it.

she’s one of my oldest, closest friends. and on that late summer evening in may, she looked absolutely stunning. i used a bright flash, to give justice to the hollywood beauty she embodied with her wide brown eyes, done up hair, and inherent elegance. the pictures are candid, the flash casting silhouettes of shadows, the black and white, the unaware model dressed to the nines. it all comes together in a flashing-camera-lights, gleaming-red-carpet kind of way. srujana, a vision in white and gold, captured by some obscure, admiring photographer.

this was a school project. my first tangible endeavor into photography really. i took a photography class my junior year of high school and this was the first main assignment. we were meant to pick a song, and from that song create a set of photographs inspired by our interpretations. for me, specifically, the photographs reflect my emotional interpretations, what the song reminded me of.

this town by niall horan. the song, to me, was wistful and hopeful and achingly nostalgic. the lyrics were powerful to me because i found myself understanding them on a personal level. i chose the song for the project because it was easy to picture the different emotions running throughout the song; laughter, sorrow, emptiness, reminiscence, etc.

the subjects of the photographs are my friends ella, meaghan, and jacky.