Kaamna Patel is a photographer born in Mumbai, India. Her work explores the periphery of photographic documentation, often with themes of satire, illusion & the impossibility of representation.
Her publishing house, Editions JOJO, was born as an extension of her practice with the book ‘In Today’s News: Alpha Males Women Power’ in May 2019. Editions JOJO has since metamorphosed into an independent publishing house, photobook library & an artist-led platform based in Mumbai where Kaamna embodies numerous roles.
She has been an artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, in 2022, at SqW:Lab, Mumbai, in 2024 and at the SHIFT Residency, Gujarat in 2025. Her work has been exhibited as part of both solo and group shows, and her photobooks have entered institutional archives such as the Getty Museum in L.A, the Tate Modern in London, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, amongst others.
Shift Residency:
A core aspect of Kaamna Patel’s practice as a photographer leans towards found images. She sources these from places such as the internet, catalogues, pamphlets and newspapers thereby bringing the image to the forefront irrespective of the pixel quality. Instead, as these images become central to her work they uncover nuances that may often be overlooked by the consuming audience. When looking through saree catalogues at the packaging unit of the residency factory, Patel was drawn immediately not to the models but to their hand gestures which changed ever so slightly and hence suggested that it was not the same image photoshopped and layered over differently. Her work at the residency zoomed in on these hand gestures and took on two iterations – a grid of gestures drawn from the catalogues and printed on silk screen at the factory, and a flipbook that became a satire on ‘flipping through’ a catalogue which shopping in a market of mass production and consumption. Along with these images, memory preservation and creation are an underlying aspect of Patel’s work. Her second work at the residency was based on one of her earliest memories of a bleached coral. While the memory is an intangible form with no evidence to confirm it, she worked with a found image of a coral and created a six-meter work with various hues of blue created through a discharge process at the residency factory. In repeating this element, there is an attempt to hold onto a memory that seems as ephemeral as holding onto a colour or segment of the ocean in which this coral may have existed.
Outcome
Study of Memory: Coral
An experimental approach to visually translating a key element from my first personal memory - bleached coral. This study forms part of a larger inquiry into personal memory, fragmentation & translation through layers of collective experience.
Edition of 5
Print on cotton
276” X 45”
Show of Hands
A residency-specific response to the saree catalogues, observing the slight shift in hand gestures that indicate a change in what otherwise appears as homogenous imagery in a mass production cycle.
Edition of 5
Print on cotton : 36” X 45”