Most photographers chase the world. Vikram Kushwah builds a better one and steps inside it.
From a carefree childhood set in the idyllic Himalayan foothills to art and photography studies in England, the London-based artist still draws on a dreamy child’s imagination — its fantasies, its desires, its fears. His images challenge the notion of reality with an unembarrassed romanticism, the romanticism of looking back at a purer self. That nostalgia is also a quiet rebellion: a refusal of a modern world where spiralling destruction is routine and where the perversions of popular culture pass for normal.
The uncanny, carefully staged
Whatever the medium — photograph or painting — Kushwah’s process and outcome share a romantic, surrealist approach. His acclaimed series Ofelea is, in his words, “a portrait of his imagination and memories, often twisted by the dark underlying layers of the storybooks he read as a child” — a juxtaposition of Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, the recurring mysterious environments of Surrealist art, and reconstructions of a distant childhood imagination. His painstakingly staged images are proof that it takes an entire process to make a body of work with context and depth, and that pressing the shutter is emphatically not the defining moment in picture-taking.
Why it reads sharper now
That last idea is the one worth carrying into 2026. We live in the golden age of the effortless image — instant, generated, frictionless. Kushwah’s whole practice insists on the opposite: that the meaning is in the building, the sets and costumes and decisions made long before the exposure. His work went on to feature in Italian Vogue’s New Talents pages and to hang at 10 Corso Como in Milan, but the lesson is portable and free: wonder, like curiosity, can make seemingly impossible things happen — if you are willing to construct the dream by hand.