Nicolas Khorana Latulippe

The Local is the breath of Mumbai.

The city's suburban rail moves roughly seven million people a day across the Central and Western lines, the fastest way across the 'City of Dreams,' and the one nearly everyone takes. What began as colonial infrastructure, built to move goods out and inherited by an independent India in 1947, was quietly reclaimed by the people who ride it into something the British never intended: a casteless space where none of what divides you determines whether you board.

The Mumbai Local is an ongoing analog project I've been shooting across this network. The carriages run from before dawn until past midnight, each one its own ecosystem, overhead fans turning, doors left open to cool the cars, riders hanging their bodies out into the blur of the city. Modernization is moving through it fast, changing the trains and the social world they've held for generations. Inside, bodies press together across class, language, and religion, gathered into a closeness that exists almost nowhere else in Indian public life. The pressure produces something: pauses, gestures, conversation, exhaustion, recognition between strangers building in the spaces between stops. It is closeness under strain, not the easy kind. I work with a wide lens, close and unannounced, letting the architecture of the train and its stations become the geometry of the image, grain and atmosphere carrying the feel of each community's corridor. The prints are silver gelatin, 11x14 and 16x20, large enough to hold that density. Alongside them I've been developing the negatives in ways that pull the subject into the surface of the print, printing onto South Asian textiles with a developer made from chai and turmeric, so the cultural material sits within the photograph itself.

I came to this as a photographer raised in Canada with South Asian roots, carrying a camera and a cultural inheritance I'd spent most of my life searching to understand. I've spent close to nine months in India over the past two years, and inside the carriages that distance starts to close. I'm visibly South Asian enough to move through the space without question, and just unfamiliar enough to never stop noticing it, seeing people who share my skin and my history, separated from me by seas and years and a life lived so differently. The work holds that tension without resolving it. The same pressure that works on the carriages works in the darkroom, on the surface of the print, and on me: I return across that distance changed by the contact, not in control of how, and the work doesn't resolve that any more than I do. I am available to take part in artist talks or workshops during the exhibition period.