“I’m trying to capture something more fragile than a regular story. I love what people bring me.”
– Agnes Varda
Born in Calcutta, India, Prantik spent his early life there before moving to Canada and later the United States for graduate studies. He is currently based in Ithaca, New York, where he works in research and development in the physical sciences.
His engagement with photography began when he traveled to Mexico in 2006 with his first DSLR, a Pentax K1000 and ten rolls of Tri-X 400. What followed was not a deliberate project but a gradual gravitation toward observational photography in the tradition of “Personal Documentary”.
The photographs presented here are not intended as comprehensive travel essays or documentary accounts. They are personal sketches – fragmentary, unresolved, and often distant – reflecting fleeting encounters with places and people as they reveal themselves in unguarded moments.
Prantik’s visual sensibility is shaped by writers and filmmakers attentive to ambiguity, interiority, and emotional restraint, including Anton Chekhov, Ingmar Bergman, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan, as well as photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Larry Towell, Alex Webb.