Eye (Muma and Maushi) from the "Buttons for Eyes" series

About the Photographer

Kambli, Priya

Indian, b.1975

Born in India, Priya Kambli moved to the United States in 1993, at the age of eighteen a few years after the death of her parents, to pursue her education. For Kambli, photography is a means to bridge the gap between two cultures, coming to terms with the effects of displacement, and to illuminate connections between the past and the present. Kambli creates compositions that juxtapose older family pictures with artifacts she brought from home, along with her own recent photographs, using arrangements of multiple images to bring out visual and poetic correlations. In many of her compositions Kambli creates patterns within flour overlaid on top of archival images, recalling Indian saris and creating a visual bridge between now and then, here and there.

Priya Kambli is currently Professor of Art at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri. In 2008 PhotoLucida awarded her a book publication prize for her project Color Falls Down, published in 2010. Her works have been included in exhibitions at the Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award for Women Documentarians, Duke University, Durham, NC (2020); the Sheldon Art Galleries, St Louis, MO (2018); and the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA (2016); among many others.