User:Rajiv Srivastava

Rajiv Srivastava thinks pictorially, preferring his images to do the talking for him. Born in 1980, in Roing in Arunachal Pradesh, Srivastava spent the major part of his life in this remote north-eastern state where his father was joint director in the ministry of education. Having grown up in such musically sounding but isolated places as Yinkiong, Pasighat and Naharlagun, Srivastava enrolled for an undergraduate course in tourism in New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi National Open University, but dropped out after the first year, letting his passion for cricket rule his life for the following five years.

Havine exorcised the ghosts of professional cricket from his life, he worked with fashion photographer Tarun Vishwa for three years. His early stint as a fashion photographer, what many would regard as a masterful opportunity, did not hold long-term appeal for him, and he soon abandoned it for commercial, studio photography – the bread-and-butter caveat – but his restless eye was constantly seeking images outside his domain of work. Srivastava wanted to shoot his own kind of images his own way without the dictates of consumerism or the diktats of clients. Increasingly, he looked beyond the studio, capturing moments and images for his private viewing, pictures that were helping him experiment and grow.

Srivastava has ambitiously looked at landscapes far apart – austere and forbidding Ladakh in the Himalayas, and the blowing sands in the outreaches of Bikaner, Barmer and Jodhpur in Rajasthan’s Thar. He first travelled to Ladakh in 2007, when he began taking pictures, and has since returned a number of times, in different seasons, inspired, he has no qualms in admitting, in huge part by photographer Prabudha Dasgupta whose book on Ladakh was the initial trigger that took him to this fascinating part of the world. He found a similar resonance in the lonely, yawning chasms and expanse of the Thar desert. www.rajivsrivastava.in/