Picture essay: Aman Alam’s Ozymandias

A poignant and disorienting meditation on time, reality and the devastating toll of dementia

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To view the pictures that make up Aman Alam’s Ozymandias is to really feel each disoriented and deeply moved. From 2020 on, the Indian photographer photographed his grandmother, Naseem, as she lived with Alzheimer’s illness. 

The ensuing collection, Ozymandias, presently exhibiting on the French images pageant Les Rencontres d’Arles, is each a tribute to Naseem and an intimate file of caregiving and loss. 

Alam, 32, who lives and works between Bengaluru and Kolkata, started making the images whereas he and his mom shared duty for her care. What started as a means for Alam to deal with the overwhelming expertise of watching her well being deteriorate progressively developed into a bigger physique of labor.

Remembering his grandmother, who died in April, he says: “She was always a larger-than-life figure. She was a college professor. She was a college principal after that. Whenever we used to go back home, me and my mum, during the summers, and we would meet her, it always just felt like I was in awe.”

Alam’s poignant black and white images whirl and refuse to remain nonetheless. Time shifts inside the undertaking, transferring between his grandmother as a younger lady and in her later years, in a hospital mattress, her household caring for her.

Alam permits the viewer to take from his work what they may, resisting the concept of a single model of reality. “I started out with photojournalism and very hardcore documentary photography stuff, where it was very important to stick to what the so-called truth is when you put work out,” he says.

He took a totally completely different strategy to this undertaking.

“I think over the past four or five years, dealing with how things have been with my grandmother’s health and the rest of things in life, I’ve sort of changed… where I just feel that a photograph does not really hold truth,” Alam says. “It does not hold objective truth, at least. And maybe, to an extent, that there is no objective truth. Everything is just what we make of it, our perspective of it.”

Ozymandias brings collectively archival and authentic images, medical scans and handwritten notes. There are photos of canine, horses and birds, of Alam’s mom and shut household rallying round his grandmother. A walnut resembles a mind. 

For Alam, images provided a means of coping with the pressures of caregiving. He describes his digital camera “an emotional support tool”, and explains that “whenever a situation would get too overwhelming, I would press the shutter”.

Alongside images, he additionally turned to his religion. His grandmother was the one who taught him how one can learn the Qur’an and how one can pray.

Alam’s easy want is for the work to discover a wider viewers, for it to journey — for the undertaking to not merely be about his personal grandmother, however to be helpful to anybody going via comparable experiences.

“Everyone could sort of see themselves in the photos to some extent,” he says. “And that was sort of what I wanted, that this is not only my grandmother’s story. She could be your grandmother as well. She could be anyone. This is just a very universal human story.”

Aman Alam’s Ozymandias is on show at Les Rencontres d’Arles till 4 October 2026.