Vani Bhushan, who graduated in 2025 from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in photography was recently featured in Aperture’s “Introducing” Series, which highlights exciting new voices in photography. Bhushan spoke with Kamayani Sharma about her MFA project, which includes a collection of photos of Delhi, India. One untitled series and another called Waiting on images that won’t appear explores the relationship between camera and field, state and citizen, and history and memory.
Here is how Sharma describes the two series:
The untitled series, shot with the 4-by-5 camera, depicts the characters of the policemen in medias res at the untended, vaguely industrial, and desolate frontiers of Delhi. Bhushan composed the images without a viewfinder, shooting without seeing. She gave little direction to the participants, because “once the film is in and you’re exposing the negative, you’re not looking at anything. I don’t see what I’m doing as I press the shutter. I am positioning my actors, but they’re not standing still. And standing still is very important to the 4 x 5.” On the other hand, in the series Waiting on images that won’t appear, the fluidity of the 35mm camera places Bhusan—and by extension the viewer—in the thick of what resembles a first-person record of police brutality. Shooting these images, she felt like a photojournalist, “because I’m moving while the performance is happening and there’s multiple times where I have gotten hit because I’m so within the moment.”
You can find the full article here.
Photo credit: Vani Bhushan, Untitled (Office), 2025, from the series Untitled, India