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 Buku Sarkar 

 BIOGRAPHY 

Buku Sarkar is a photographer and writer who works between Calcutta, New York, and Paris. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, n+1, ZYZZYVA, and The Threepenny Review. She is a recipient of the Andrew Lytle Best Fiction of the Year Award, while her photography has been featured in The New York Times, Art Basel Miami, and exhibitions at the International Center of Photography.

Her debut novel, Not Quite a Disaster After All, was published by HarperCollins India in December 2023 and is now available in the U.S. with Flowersong Press. Her photobook Photowali Didi (Fall Line Press, 2023), documenting her five-year relationship with residents of a Calcutta slum, explores themes of identity and belonging across cultures. Her forthcoming poetry collection, My Dead Flowers, will be published in December 2025 by HarperCollins India.

Sarkar serves as part-time faculty at the International Center of Photography and offers writing workshops. Her screenplay The Shameless was adapted into a feature film that premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival in 2024. Her work examines the complexities of cross-cultural identity, feminine freedom, social stratification, and the spaces between worlds - both literal and metaphorical. She is currently working on a novel about two generations of an Indian family in New York, a memoir about living with a neurological disorder, short stories, and a photographic series exploring women’s relationships with their bodies, building on seven years of documenting her own illness through self-portraits and a memoir in her series Containment Diaries.

"Since 2013, after I fell ill with a still undiagnosed neurological disorder similar to Parkinson’s and was unable to write (I was a writer first and foremost), I took to photography as a way to cope with everyday life. It soon became my diary to the world. After seven years, I decided to turn the lens onto other women and their relationship with their bodies, which may or may not arise out of illness. Our relationship with our bodies - ever changing - is a very complex one. All the participants in this project are volunteers who wanted to explore some aspect of their past or present through the lens and therefore chose to participate - some to get over trauma, disorders, or fears. The series is a way of giving women the power to dictate how they are seen, to explore the possibilities of portraiture, of women, the female form, and serves as a tribute to the many forgotten female artists in history. It also asks the question: how does gender interface with art and ways of seeing? The series will also be accompanied by a book of essays of the same name on these themes, to be published by HarperCollins India (2027/28). The project is twofold. On one hand, there is a portraiture series of at least thirty women, although I hope to include more. On the other, there are essays on the themes of portraiture, gender, the male gaze, ways of seeing, movement, and time in photography, which will be published as a book by HarperCollins India. As of writing this statement, the series, although not fully complete, has been selected for exhibitions in eleven venues across the world."

 THE INTERVIEW 

 You navigate life and work across several cities and cultures. In which ways does living between worlds affect the way   you engage with your surroundings and your own practice? 

Well, in some ways you get used to the fact that you’re always an outsider. And in some ways you’re always trying to find a way to become an insider again. I do think that the tension of trying to belong wherever I am is something that inevitably runs through my work.

 Illness has redefined your relationship with your body and the unfolding of time. How has this journey deepened your   approach to creativity, patience, and self-compassion? 

It has taught me to build a wall around myself, which I appreciate. I think the only way I’m able to write - or even photograph - about it is by having that wall, so I can be objective from the outside. I do think a certain amount of objectivity is necessary; it comes hand in hand with clarity. At least I don’t have the gift of understanding anything unless a certain amount of time has passed - a certain amount of distance between myself and the past. Perhaps in some ways I’ve become slower, more complacent. Who knows?

 By foregrounding women’s voices, agency, and collaboration, your portraits disrupt traditional power dynamics. To what   extent does this redistribution of authority redefine relationships between subject, artist, and viewer? 

Well, I never thought about it in terms of redefining anything. It was really just important to me that the subjects of my portraits wanted themselves to be photographed - in a particular way, or in the way that I suggested to them. That consent was very important because part of what I think matters in this project is giving women the freedom we’ve never had: to view ourselves as ourselves. We only see ourselves through the male lens, even when we don’t realise that we’re always doing it. So this is a sort of exercise in trying to liberate ourselves from those preconceived ideas we were born with. It’s a chance to explore who we are, and who we aren’t. I don’t think the portrait needs to tell the truth. I think the portrait can be a game and I think it’s absolutely okay if we play a game. But it needs to be our game and our choice, no matter what your gender is.

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Photography Awards and Recognitions

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  • Long listed for the Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize
    Chosen as a member of Women Photograph 2021

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Monograph
First photo book, Photowali Didi, Published by Fall Line Press 2023. A documentary about my
five year relationship with the residents of a local slum.
More on https://www.bukusarkar.com/selectedworks#/photowalididi/


Published Work in Photography

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  • 2016: The New York Review of Books: Sharmila, The Chaiwala and Me: 2021 Documentum Journal. 

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  • 2020: Fast Forward. Women In Photography. 

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  • 2020: The Sister with the Photos, Duck Rabbit Blog. 

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  • 2020: 0PrintMagazine. 

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  • 2020: Humble Arts Foundation, Loss. 

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  • 2021: Humble Arts Foundation, Special solo feature, Photo Monitor, Containment Diaries. 

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  • 2021: The Curators.

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  • 2021: The Curious Society. 

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Group Exhibitions

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  • 2019: Facing Ourselves, The Betsy Hotel, Art Basel Miami. ​

 

  • 2019: For Freedoms: It is a Miracle That We Are Still Standing Here, ICP, New York, NY. 

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  • 2022: Nippon Gallery, Mumbai. 

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  • 2023: CIMA Gallery, Calcutta.

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  • 2023-2024: Vidion and Expression- the art of photography: Ph21 Gallery, Barcelona. 

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  • 2025: Imagenation Paris. 

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  • 2025: Paris Art Expo. 

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  • 2025: Detox Gallery, New York. 

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  • 2025: Transcendence, Boomer Gallery, London. 

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  • 2025: GlenaArt Studio, London. With Shim Art Network- Miami Art Week. 

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  • 2026: Galerie HeligkeitMilan: International Contemporary Art Fair. 

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  • 2026: Arrival Gallery, Lisbon. 

 

  • 2026: Arrival Gallery, New York. 

 

  • 2026: Body, Kiff Et Marie, Paris. 

 

  • 2026: Ephemere, Tokyo. 

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  • 2026: Palazzo Pisani-Revedin during the Venice Biennale 2026, curated by Amy Jackson in

collaboration with SHIM Art Network.
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Solo Exhibitions

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  • 2021: Trento Art Festival, Trento, Italy.

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  • 2021: Head On Festival, Sydney, Australia.

 

 

  • 2023: Launch of photobook Photowali Didi at Paris Photo. 

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  • 2024: launch of Photobook Photowali Didi at Les Recontre D’Arles. 

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Special Achievements and Honors in Writing

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  • 2010: Alpha Sigma Lambda (National Honor Society) and Outstanding Academic Achievementrecognition, New School. 

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  • 2011: MA with Distinction, University of East Anglia. 

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  • Finalist for Curtis Brown Award for Dissertation, University of East Anglia. 

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  • ReLIT NY Accolades (Founder of grassroots non-profit to encourage reading): The New Yorker, Huffington Post, Gothamist, Poets & Writers, Reuterd. 

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Awards and publications in Writing

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  • 2023: Not Quite A Disaster After All, Harper Collins India.

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  • 2024: Flower Song Press, US, (Fiction). 

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  • Photowali Didi (photo book). 

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  • Women and Bodies (essays on photography, forthcoming 2027/28 with Harper Collins

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Other Publications and awards

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  • 2010: 12th Street Literary Journal, Lexington Avenue (the issue won the award for best content at AWP); TIME Digital and TIME International Cover Story, Summer 1998- Cyber Elite; Various short articles for TIME Digital, Summer 1998. 

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  • 2012: Condé Nast Traveller India, Museum of Innocence; interview with Orhan Pamuk. 

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  • 2012: N+1 Magazine, The Visit (Fiction of the month). 

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  • 2014: Threepenny Review, Lexington Avenue (essay). 

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  • 2015: Mint Lounge, Lead profile of writer Amitav Ghosh. 

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  • 2016: Huffington Post, Intimacy & Photography (photos and essay). 

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  • 2018: Apt. Literary Journal, Not Quite A Disaster After All (fiction). 

 

  • 2019: Raleigh Review, Jackson Heights (fiction). 

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  • 2021: The New York Review of Books: Sharmila, The Chaiwala and Me. 

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  • 2021: Sewanee Review, Aunt B (recipient of the Andrew Lytle Prize for best published fiction). 

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  • 2021: ZYZZYVA, Afternoons (fiction). 

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  • 2026: My Dead Flowers, Harper Collins India. 

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Work Experience


Photography: p/t faculty at ICP, New York. 


Creative Writing: Teaching courses at The Writer’s Center, (January 2024). Center for Fiction, (Spring 2024). International Center for Photography, (June 2024). Hudson Valley Writers Center, (October 2024).

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