The intimacy of everyday life

Photo Feature: Moments overlooked. Fleeting. The dignity, beauty and melancholy of ordinary folks.

Photos and Text by Avinash Kumar

I am a historian, writer, and civil society actor whose camera becomes a quiet companion to his work and travels across India. Trained in modern Indian history at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a Charles Wallace Fellow at SOAS, London, I have spent over two decades working at the intersection of social movements, human rights and public policy—as a teacher, researcher, campaigner, and organisational head with Amnesty International India, WaterAid, and Oxfam.

Alongside my work, I have been capturing the intimate, fleeting, and often overlooked moments of everyday life—children at play, solitary workers, toiling women, desolate urban corners, quiet street gatherings, rural scenes. My photographs—both black and white and colour—seek to hold onto that passing world, creating small windows into the dignity, beauty, and melancholy of people and places in transition.

What informs my images is an ethical gaze and an instinct for stillness amid motion. Whether taken during a public hearing with migrant workers, or while walking through an alley in Ambikapur, each frame is a meditation on memory, time, and presence.

This offbeat media platform marks the first public sharing of a visual archive that has grown slowly, quietly, over years of witnessing.

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