Seeping in Through the Cracks

Chandni Gajria reiterates how sometimes finding a muse means peeling off the layers and really listening to yourself.

- Chandni Gajria

Rainer Maria Rilke’s book, Letters to a Young Poet, was instrumental in preparing me to take the plunge into exploring my own vision as a photographer. But much before that, Wong Kar-wai’s poetic and visually rich movies had already begun to influence the way I thought, created, even wrote. Years later, I came across Rinko Kawauchi’s work in her book Illuminance. There was something delicate about the images that I couldn’t shake off… almost poetically fragile. The images in Illuminance, and in most of Rinko’s work, sing like a song, a melody that speaks of the impactful narrative. To create something so powerful, something that truly moves you, be it Rilke’s words, Wong Karwai’s cinema or Rinko’s photographs, can only be done if the work comes from a personal space—the personal within you.