Ones to Watch 2025 – Jaisingh Nageswaran

Every 12 months, BJP publishes its Ones to Watch subject – our number of the artists who epitomise the expertise and creativity in worldwide pictures at the moment, as nominated by a world community of curators, editors, and artists.

As we finalise this 12 months’s record, to be revealed in Issue 7926, out this June, we’re revisiting the 2025 Ones to Watch. Today, Jaisingh Nageswaran, as nominated by Abhishek Khedekar.

Born in rural Tamil Nadu, India, Jaisingh Nageswaran is a self-taught image-maker whose observe centres round questions of place and identification. Truth Dream, an early venture he contributed to, depicts older members of the trans neighborhood in portrait studios, appearing out their fantasy lives; The Lodge exhibits transgender and cross-dressing people in Tamil Nadu, shot on Polaroid so that every one might belief the method. Down by the River: Mullai Periyar revisits childhood recollections and celebrates life by the river that Nageswaran grew up alongside. The Land That is No More exhibits his homeland in nostalgic black-and-white. I Feel Like a Fish is an modern mixture of cell phone pictures, textual content and wet-plate collodion, and speaks of 4 generations of household historical past and resilience – it was made throughout lockdown, when Nageswaran felt compelled to look inward and doc private tales.

More not too long ago, Nageswaran has turned the digital camera on himself and his homeland in Lizard’s Tail, which mixes pictures into double exposures that counsel how recollections combine and mix. “I’m always pushing my boundaries to change my aesthetics,” he explains. “Every story is different, so I want to use particular formats to tell particular stories. For Lizard’s Tail I wanted to slow down, to use analogue square format, not shoot 10,000 digital images. It’s almost 80 per cent done and I want to turn it into a book – I learnt about photography from the classic French and Japanese photobooks, so I always want to turn my projects into books.”