Emami Art is pleased to present শহরনামা | Calcutta 1990-1993, a solo exhibition of photographs by artist and photographer Kushal Ray, opening on 8 August 2026. Drawn from thousands of negatives made during an intensive engagement with Calcutta in the early 1990s, the show offers a rare view into one of the most sustained photographic studies of the city from that period.
At the heart of Ray’s practice is a humanist philosophy grounded in observation, discipline, and proximity. Returning repeatedly to particular neighbourhoods, routes, crossings, bridges, ferries, buses, parks, public benches, and street corners, he built an expansive record of the city and its inhabitants. In 1991 alone, he exposed over 268 rolls of film. And, across this archive, people occupy every frame, commuting, waiting, working, resting, or gathering, caught within the ordinary rhythms of urban life. His images carry a strong sense of structure and timing, shaped by an attentiveness to the unpredictability of a place the artist knows intimately and inhabits closely.
Many of the social worlds and surfaces depicted here have since changed profoundly or vanished altogether, making these photographs a record of Calcutta on the threshold of transformation. So vast was the output of those years that numerous negatives remained unprinted for decades; several works in this exhibition are being seen by the artist as positive images for the first time, more than thirty years after they were made. Together, they reintroduce an extraordinary photographic record and reaffirm Kushal Ray’s place among the city’s most dedicated visual chroniclers.
শহরনামা | Calcutta 1990-1993, marks a significant reintroduction to Kushal Ray’s work and his remarkable archive of Calcutta and Calcuttans.
