Amartya De's New Haven

Top: Amartya De in the darkroom at Trumbull College. Lucy Gellman Photo. Bottom: Students in Beinecke Plaza. Amartya De Photo.

At first, it’s the rounded triangle of the tent that catches a viewer off guard, the edges framed between two stately buildings that rise in the background. Beneath it, the ground seems dark, cool. Inside, two students look right out at the photographer, faces serious, almost impassive. Even in the half-darkness, slices of light wrap around them, adding a sort of cinematic drama to the whole scene.

For New Haveners, there’s an immediate sense of time and place: this is Beinecke Plaza, a sprawling expanse of white granite and Vermont marble in the center of Yale University’s campus, during protests that roiled the school in 2024 and again in 2025. But there’s also something surreal here, as if these humans have been accidentally dropped into a canvas by Arnold Böcklin or Giorgio de Chirico.

That tension lives at the heart of work by the artist and photographer Amartya De, who has been working to grow his footprint in New Haven from the Ely Center of Contemporary Art to Wábi Gallery to a revived darkroom in Yale’s Trumbull College. Along the way, his care for the city—its people and places, including fellow artists—has become a new chapter in his work that he is hoping to expand as he nears a decade in the Elm City.

“I think I’m still figuring out how to get under the skin [in my photography],” he said in a recent interview outside of Trumbull College, as sun splattered the pavement around the building. In his hands, De held boxes of prints from different chapters in his career. “I think New Haven is good for that.”

“He is extraordinarily dedicated to photography,” said Aimée Burg, director of the Ely Center of Contemporary Art, where De was an inaugural artist in residence in 2023. “In all aspects. He can talk theory, hands on approaches, technical skills … Photography is one of the avenues of fine arts I know the least about and I have learned a lot from listening to him. He is eager to engage with people, no matter if in an art context or not.”

The school De once attended is one of his subjects. 

De’s artistic love story with New Haven, which is still unfolding, is a story of rigorous training, of old- and new-school photographic practices, and of what it means to call many cities home, sometimes at the same time. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, De grew up in a household that was decidedly not artistic, save for an aunt who was an author and newspaper columnist. If anything, he said, he gravitated towards sculpture, after playing around with scrap metal that he found in his neighborhood.  

But even that was the stuff of childhood play, not a practice he thought he would sustain into his adult life.

In school, photography wasn’t really part of the lesson plan either—although colonialism, which De still grapples with openly in his work, very much was. De attended La Martiniere for Boys, named after an eighteenth-century French army officer who was at one point the richest white man in India. At the time, he remembered, he wasn’t taught to interrogate or challenge the history, so much as to learn it. That came later; it still does, when there’s a camera in his hands.

“To be honest, I hadn’t grasped the full weight of it” until much later, he said. “When we were younger, we were like, ‘This is just how we make do.’”

De with many of his prints in the darkroom. Lucy Gellman Photo; all developed images are by De.

After high school, De pursued business management, spending time in both Kolkata and Singapore. By then, he had started to dabble in digital photography not as an artistic practice, but a documentary one, taking professional photos of real estate development and construction as the city changed rapidly around him.

Then, around the time he was 25, he started taking black and white film photography—the medium for which he may be most well-known in New Haven—much more seriously. A close friend, the fellow photographer Rahul Dhankani, was in the process of dissolving The Lighthouse, a cultural hub in Kolkata where a person could spend a day surrounded by art books and the hum of conversation, and catch a workshop or three.

He left De with extra film, which led to a visit to Bikash Bose, a printer who ran one of the last darkrooms in the city. (Bose later died during the Covid-19 pandemic.)

The connection with Bose was, in many ways, a turning point for De and his work. When De ran through the film he had in hand, he would head to Bose’s studio, and for 150 rupees—that’s a little over a dollar and fifty cents—have the negatives developed. It gave him a sense of, and reverence for, the alchemy that goes into running a darkroom. It was and is the opposite of instant gratification that people often experience with digital photography.

“Being in the darkroom is interesting because you’re getting to see it [the process],” he said, as he opened up the door to a darkroom he restored with student Samuel Ostrove in the basement of Trumbull College. “Black and white printing can’t be copied. It changes your perspective in the field.”

Amartya De Photo.

In 2018, De’s interest in film photography and printing practices led him to the International Center for Photography (ICP), where artists from Dayanita Singh, Jonathan Wells and the late Félix González-Torres to Wábi Founder Kim Weston have also studied. At the ICP, where he now teaches, he pursued the school’s one-year certificate in creative practices. In his artwork from that time, he did a little of everything, with a focus on portraiture that criss-crossed the U.S. from New York to California and back again. In the works from those years, shot in both black and white and color, De has focused on both people and place, with portraits that unfold in neighborhoods, sprawling, wild gardens, and in the middle of the California woods.

In one, taken in the Bronx, a young boy looks right out at De, a bright, pink-wheeled bike steady beneath him and emblazoned with the words So Cal Flyer. His right hand, only half-relaxed, rests on the handlebar brake. His left foot perches on a pedal, letting the viewer know that he’s got some place to be.

There’s a hoodie, turned inside out and haphazardly folded, around his neck where a sweaty towel might otherwise be. He hunches forward just the tiniest bit, the way boys do when they are on the cusp of adolescence, and unsure where to put their bodies.

When he graduated from the ICP’s certificate program, De sensed that he wasn’t done with his studies. By then, he was not just intrigued by the thin, porous line between documentation, fine art, and old-school praxis; he was probing it in his work, from Kolkata to the Bronx to Northern California, where he made his home for a while in 2020. The Yale School of Art, which has turned out photographers like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and An-My Lê—photographers of life, in all its messiness and complexity— felt like the logical next step.

“The reason I came here was because there are so many graduates [of the program] who are out in the field,” he said. “My wildest hope would be to survive as an artist.”

Amartya De Photo.

It turned out that New Haven was, in many ways, as much of a revelation for him as Yale. In spaces like the Yale Center for British Art, as well as in his classes, he discovered artworks that pushed him to think about the weight of history, and of colonization, in a way that he never had before. But as he documented both the city and the university—which has its own history of colonialism and erasure—he pulled the curtain back on how practices that may have started centuries ago bleed unexpectedly into the present.

In an image from Yale’s West Campus taken in 2022, for instance, he has photographed painter and printmaker Fiza Khatri, then a fellow graduate student at the Yale School of Art (Khatri graduated in 2023), seated cross-legged against a tall, plastic-wrapped stack of crates. In one hand, they hold three or four brushes. In the other, they are working on a rendering of a gharial, a member of the crocodile family specific to South Asia that was recently restored at Yale’s Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH). A canvas rests gently on their knees, chrome-colored tubes of paint gathered beneath it like an offering.

There is so much in this single image: the contrast between the young artist and the preserved, taxidermied animal, which ultimately played a key role in Khatri’s graduate thesis; the pristine, light-filled white room, so antiseptic that it seems more like a morgue or hospital; these two bodies, plucked out of space and time, sharing this single moment across continents and centuries. And De, the unmentioned third party, there to document it all.

Some of the most interesting work from this time comes from between 2021 and 2022, when De was traveling between New Haven, Kolkata, and several other U.S. cities, and exploring what it meant to shoot wooden 8x10 field camera, which could create crisp, immediate portraits, but was and is more temperamental with movement and shifting light. In one image from the time, for instance, a wide city street stretches out beneath a low-hanging night sky, full of bright, bending light in every direction.

Amartya De holds up an image from Kolkata, which still is a prominent character in his work.

Here, De has given his viewer a sense of place—we are in Kolkata—but the architecture is secondary. What pulls a viewer (at least, this viewer) in and keeps them there is the sense of movement in every direction, bodies transformed into thick, blurring lines. When a figure snaps into focus, it feels that much more miraculous.

In another, one that he had not planned for, almost a dozen children form two lines in front of the camera, standing shoulder to shoulder, a single adult nestled amongst them. She is smiling for the camera, her eyes so tired that they don’t entirely focus. In the front row, one child looks baby-faced enough to still fit on someone’s hip, his eyes big and soft.

Beside him, there are hundreds of details worth catching: the way one boy puffs his chest out, the pursed lips of a girl beside him, the way one kid has shoved his hands casually into his pockets. Some of the figures are out of focus, their features blurry as they step back, and out of the light.

De explained that the moment was one of worlds colliding: he set his large, wooden camera up to photograph something else entirely, and then a number of the kids had approached him, asking him to take their photograph. He guessed that they were among Kolkata’s homeless population—a number that is recorded around 70,000 , but may be much higher. It’s now one of the photos he reaches for when people ask him about his work.

“I love going out, being out in the world,” De said, adding that he looks up to photographers like Dawoud Bey and Matt Black, the latter of whom last year won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his work chronicling rural and working-class life, particularly in the American Southwest.

Amartya De Photo. 

A person can see that care in many of his New Haven photos, which bridge town and gown as he travels from protests to parades to small businesses across the city, and particularly in the Dwight, Dixwell and Fair Haven neighborhoods. In one, taken during his studies at the Yale School of Art, he is standing somewhere far outside of the frame, the lens resting on a casket in which Gabriel David Vega Ramos lies. Ramos, a son of Puerto Rico who spent most of his life in New Haven, looks so young, his face peaceful as neat tattoos criss-cross its surface and run down his neck. Above him, two figures lean in, ready to pay their respects.

Even for a viewer elsewhere, this is a New Haven story: De had attended the funeral at the request of his auto mechanic, Ramos’ cousin Pete Diaz Cabasquini, after meeting him through the boxing gym Elephant In the Room. His reverence—for Cabasquini, for the moment, for the grief that might engulf the room—is palpable in the sharp focus, the deep attention he has paid to the faces of those who stop to say their final goodbyes. Funerals, after all, are for the living—and he has done right by Ramos’ spirit as it flies free.

But the photograph is also a specific document from a time period that kept taking from so many New Haveners: Diaz Cabasquini passed away suddenly a year later, at just 38 years old. In his photographs from those years, De has an image of Diaz Cabasquini’s son, Xavier, in the boxing ring, a mask pulled down beneath his chin for the photo. It’s black and white, but a viewer can still see the slick of sweat on his young face. He pulls his right knee to his chest, holding it with both hands.

“He [De] is genuinely interested in people, including their physical relationships to their surroundings, and especially that relationship specifically through the historical significance of those locations,” said Burg, and the words resonate in many of the photos. “He learns about the world and our humanity through this lens of his and it can be very inspiring. And specifically to New Haven, he has been figuring out the intricacies of this city, or attempting to at any rate, as it might be an impossible task. He has become such a key element to our New Haven art world.”

De's work in the darkroom.

In some ways, these images—past, present, and the ones De has yet to take—are together a promise to the city, to learn its nooks and crannies, to honor its people and places, as he gets to know it better. Since graduating from the Yale School of Art in 2022, from which he earned the John Ferguson Weir Award, De has worked with several artists and curators, including at ECoCA and Volume II (formerly Never Ending Books). In 2024, he was instrumental in efforts to revive a darkroom on Yale’s campus—a project he had already done for Burg, and any New Haven artists who needed it, when ECoCA was in its former home at 51 Trumbull St.

“Amartya is such an inspiring person to be around,” said Uma Sukhu, a rising junior at Yale who is studying biology and comparative literature, and will be taking over Trumbull College darkroom responsibilities in the fall. After meeting De through his darkroom class, she learned to look up to him as a mentor and a friend, who is as kind as he is knowledgeable. “The way he works is so casual, but the results are so exceptional.”

Sukhu added that she’s often in awe of how easily De will embark on a project—getting special access to museum storage, or a weeks-long photography trip in India—like it’s no big deal. Without fail, she’s always dazzled by the results.

Perhaps because photography is the lens through which De views so much of humanity, that work has continued to grow well beyond Yale’s walls. This summer, he’s been a frequent face for Wábi’s current class of FOCUS Fellows, whose work has just recently gone up at the Institute Library on Chapel Street.

“Amartya is wonderful,” said Weston, who launched the FOCUS Fellowship in 2020 to expose young people to the practice and history of photography, and particularly photographers of color they might not otherwise know. In particular, she said, she loves how his Kolkata-based work is done with such care and respect. No wonder, then, that the same kind of humanity, the same gentle touch permeates much of his more recent work from New Haven.

“He just has a way of showing the love of a space and the camaraderie of the people and the land and the culture,” she continued. “Working with him has been wonderful. He's well-informed ... and he knows how to navigate things to get things done.”

Now, De added, he wants to expand that focus on the city, with the eventual goal of a book or books that chronicle life across continents, oceans, and cities. On walks through New Haven neighborhoods and at events like Unidad Latina en Acción’s annual Día de los Muertos parade, he’s slowly building an archive of the city at a specific time and place, just as he has done in Kolkata for several years now.

“I think there's a desire to make a project or a body of work which is very New Haven centric,” De said, noting that he’s planning to work with ULA in the coming weeks, after a chance run-in with organizer John Lugo at Edge of the Woods. He remembered a recent walk that took him to De Gale Field, across from the New Haven Armory. At the time, he was struck by how many worlds come together in that single park. “It just feels like it’s not the right time to move yet.”

“New Haven objectively connects to a thought experiment, where if I wanted to connect to themes in art, I could work on a variety of topics and learn at the same time,” he added, with ideas that ranged from Henry Austin’s modernism to Black History. “So in a relatively small space, within a post industrial landscape, [it’s] a large palette to work from and train from.”