Traces

Traces is a series of photographs that depict configurations of unpolished stones and old bricks piled by hands in the sand of the Barmer and Bikaner districts of Rajasthan. These clusters that include personal offerings from the home and individually hand-inscribed gravestones are caught in the photograph at various stages of re-immersion into the ground. The handmade graves belong to people with relatively few economic resources—peasants and other inhabitants of remote villages in the desert—existing lightly upon the earth. Within the mostly Muslim graves there is also one Hindu one, gesturing toward a fallacy that the faiths are universally kept separate, which points to a more heterogenous complexity underlying national thought and traditions.