SERENA CHOPRA
b. 1953, India
Serena Chopra works on long-term photography projects to engage with South Asian communities, exploring ideas around politics, development, and migration that are interconnected to her own personal experiences. With formal portraits, landscapes, and interior compositions, she offers her viewers a portal into the lives of her subjects.
Chopra’s first body of work on Bhutan was developed over a period of twelve years at a pivotal time in the country’s history, during its transition from a monarchy to parliamentary democracy. This visual study of Bhutan’s culture and history was published as a monograph titled Bhutan, A Certain Modernity (PhotoInk, 2007) and exhibited in New York, Thimphu and across India, with accompanying photo books, The Ancients (Academic Foundation, 2015) and Bhutan Echoes (Tasveer, 2016).
During a visit to the 2010 Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, Chopra had a chance encounter with Sagar Puri ji, a nineteen year old Naga Sadhu. They collaborated on a series of intimate portraits, first in Haridwar in 2010 and then again at the Ardh Kumbh in Varanasi in 2013, which culminated into the photobook, Along the Ganga (Academic Foundation, 2013).
Steering away from more familiar forms of representation, Chopra’s process and photographic practice developed with her Majnu ka Tilla Diaries project. From 2008 to 2016, she photographed and interviewed members of the exiled Tibetan community residing at Majnu ka Tilla in New Delhi and coupled the images of her subjects along with text written in their hand in a diary-like format. This body of work was presented in a solo show at sepiaEYE in New York and in exhibitions at FotoFest Biennial in Houston in 2018 and at the Harvard Art Museum in Boston in 2020. In 2022, Chopra self-published the book Majnu ka Tilla Diaries.
In 2013, Chopra was invited to Chandernagor on assignment for Bonjour India – Festival of France to photograph the French colony of West Bengal. Chopra’s previous series displayed her process of examination and formal documentation of the communities she spends years researching, but for the Chandernagor series, she turned her lens to towards the unique French architecture of the region.
Inspired by her own personal history as the daughter of a partition survivor, Chopra began collecting stories in 2017 from witnesses and survivors of Partition for her ongoing body of work, titled The Tale of Time. Portraits from this series are on permanent display at the Partition Museum in Amritsar and New Delhi.
Chopra’s latest project veers away from her traditional portraiture of communities with an in-depth study of trees and forest life in Binsar, a sanctuary on top of a mountain in the lower Himalaya’s. Titled Shinrin, the series references the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku or forest-bathing. Between 2017 and 2020, Chopra photographed Binsar's individual trees, wildlife, and growth through the seasons, capturing the eternal aspect of the old growth forests and their inherent resilience that thrives within the transience of events in nature.
Serena Chopra’s photographs are part of the permanent collections of the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City; and the Partition Museums, Amritsar and New Delhi.