Kamal Badhey

Portals and Passageways

This body of work is a collection of photographs from a re-constructed family album. They are based on the collective story of my extended family in Secunderabad, India. The starting point of the work is Annam Rathnaiah, the oldest known ancestor of our family. He started a jewelry shop in 1884 and built an ancestral home that has been occupied for five generations.

The photographs are stitched together and woven, allowing a narrative to be constructed. The passageway is a line that takes you through time and space, memory and story. Each photograph can be entered and traveled. The portals vary from light, fire, reflection, to emotion. Their entry points can be the blackness of the rose bush’s shadows, the whiteness of the smelting fire, or the texture of aging. Other portals include the reflective surface of the mirror or the distress of childhood emotion. These separate images, when put together represents a meshwork of what I saw, felt, heard, and knew about my family.