ByIANSlife

July 09, 2022 (IANSlife) Serena Chopra navigated Majnu ka Tilla, a Tibetan refugee neighbourhood in Delhi, from 2007 to 2015, conversing and building relationships with its inhabitants, many of whom have made this place their home since their exodus from Tibet in 1959. She kept a diary by her side as she grappled with the complexities of identity, nationhood, and faith with the people who lived there.

Her portraits of people gradually found their way onto its pages, and those she photographed became a part of these diaries by sharing their words and text writing on the same pages. Chopra's new photobook, Majnu ka Tilla Diaries is a fragment of the voices that shaped her own relationships with the community, taken from the diaries she kept while visiting over eight years. This photobook is presented as a replica of the three journals that she has kept since.

Chopra is a photographer based in Delhi whose first body of work, Bhutan, A Certain Modernity, was shown in New York, Thimphu, and across India. Academic Foundation published a monograph of the work, The Ancients (2015). Chopra photographed and interviewed the Tibetan community in Delhi for a long-term personal project. The book will be released in India on August 5th at 6 p.m. at the Alliance Francaise in New Delhi.

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