Zamana

Zamana means era. It is the word for a time that has passed, and for the weight that time still carries.

The series returns to the 1950s and 60s, the decades when Sikh men were carrying their heritage into unfamiliar countries and building lives far from where they began. It is a study of the gentleman migrant. Composed, tailored, and certain of himself in places that were still learning who he was.

The wardrobe was built to the period. A double breasted checkered suit cut with local tailors in the fit of the era, a vintage umbrella for restraint and sophistication, and a pair of glasses chosen to let something modern sit quietly inside the old. On the day of the shoot a vintage car appeared almost by chance, and the whole idea lifted. What had been styled began to feel lived in.

It was photographed in New Delhi, at Connaught Place, during a trip in 2024. The colonnades and the light did much of the work. The rest was patience.

INSPIRATION
I moved to Toronto in 2021. Somewhere in that move I began paying attention to the men who did it long before me, the ones who left home with far less certainty and still carried themselves with grace. A 1935 photograph of Sikh men outside Hyde Park Corner station in London, easy and unbothered, umbrellas in hand, was where Zamana began. It is the reason for the series, and quietly, it is a portrait of my own arrival too.