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Rana Dasgupta was born in Canterbury, England in 1971, and grew up in
Cambridge. He studied French literature at Balliol College, Oxford, piano at
the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and communication
arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After his studies he worked for
some time in a marketing consultancy firm in London, Kuala Lumpur and then
New York.
In 2001, he moved to Delhi in order to produce a body of creative work
reflecting on twenty-first century cities and travel. He began work on a book
of folktales about contemporary urban life, and travelled to cities all over
Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Tokyo Cancelled was published in 2005 in
ten languages and was short-listed for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize (UK)
and the Vodafone Crossword Award (India). It was followed in 2009 by Solo,
set in the city of Sofia in Bulgaria, which is currently short-listed for the
Commonwealth Prize. Dasgupta is now working on a book about his adopted
city of Delhi.
The first and most visceral stage of Dasgupta’s decade-long engagement with
the world’s cities has always been photographic. In an interview in the
American cultural magazine Mayday he says:
My photographs are records, for the most part, of cities I did not know, and they
contain—I think—the trembling intensity of encounter. They are about surface: the
unexplored, unknown skin of strange new places, and there is a clear fixation with
the textures, shapes and scars of those places. They are records of the desire that
can exist between a person and a new city—and this is not a one-way relationship.
Sometimes the city gives back—and half your roll of film is good. Sometimes the city
has no interest at all, and you can shoot as many rolls as you want: nothing is going
to happen.
Dasgupta’s photographic series Carbon is drawn from this photographic quest
through cities as far-flung as Moscow, Hong Kong and London. It is not epic,
however, but intimate and reflective. It is a meditation on the surfaces
between which city people live their lives, and the processes through which
we live and die.
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