Usual Self

Usual Self presents a selection of recent works by photographer Suraj Singh Bhamra (b. 1989). Born in Windsor, Ontario to Indian Immigrants, Bhamra uses the photographic medium to investigate the shifting formation of identity and exploration of self and others in contemporary society. The figures presented through his work are depicted as powerful, impactful, and unyielding in the face of an ever-growing miasma that leaves us asking who we are and what is to become of us.

Central to the work presented in this exhibition are signature visual elements that Bhamra uses to colorize his images. The use of a wide-angle lens presents the viewer with the idea of a photographer participating in the dialog that is being photographed instead of one simply observing a transgression on the street. Teetering compositions promote the feelings of stress, uncertainty, and anxiety navigating his daily routines but also queries the viewer’s own sense of self as well as their national, cultural, and political allegiances. Finally, Bhamra uses compositions of scenes that are peripherally familiar not only in the first magnitude effect of location, but also in tangential effects connected to memories associated with the recognizable.

As much as Bhamra’s work is a visual diary of his own emotions, the work also aims to stimulate a wider conversation of who we are as a society. Contained in the contemporary American landscape inside of the arterial streets diffused into the skin of the nation are people who reside by choice, unwillingly, or in protest. These disparate elements are energized through these images and form a visual pressure cooker that is manifested photographically in small dramas that Bhamra captures unfolding on the street. In a number of images, figures are depicted in a way that renders them almost stone-like, permanently fated to occupy that to which they are currently confined. In others, a quiet vignette of a sudden moment of love sparked by the synapses of two bodies touching.

The exhibition celebrates Bhamra’s ability to use the camera not only as a photographic instrument, but a barometer used to measure the volatility of the concentric worlds inside and outside of us through these twenty photographs created in 2021 and 2022, the majority of which are being shown for the first time. Identity and the here-now are not fixed concepts in Bhamra’s works, but rather continually evolving and imperfect ideas that guide us to our future selves. The figures and scenes depicted in this work offer an alternative way for us to view those concentric worlds we occupy.