“I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.”
– Agnes Varda
After spending the first two decades in his city of birth, Calcutta, India, Prantik moved to Canada followed by United States for graduate studies . Currently, he is settled in Ithaca, New York, pursuing a career in Research and Development, mostly in the physical sciences.
His interest in photography nucleated when he traveled to Mexico in 2006 with his first digital SLR, a Pentax K1000 and ten rolls of Tri-X 400. The muse emerged as a form of street/travel photography in the “Personal Documentary” genre. His approach is exploratory, without any preconception or planning, and is triggered by a spontaneous response to a sight, or a mood, or a moment – in the words of Martine Franck “..the moment you can not anticipate; you have to be constantly watching for it, ready to welcome the unexpected”.
The galleries here are by no means comprehensive essays or travel guides of the countries. They are, instead, personalized sketches – fleeting vignettes of the places he visited, the streets he walked, the people he encountered.
Prantik’s aesthetic sensibility has been influenced by – Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, André Kertész, Sebastião Salgado, Alex Webb; Edward Hopper, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall; Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag; Ingmar Bergman, Michaelangelo Antonioni, Andrei Tarkovsky, Krzysztof Kieślowski; to name a few.