WHO?
This is Koushik Sinha Roy, a high school teacher by profession and street photographer by passion. I was born and brought up in a sub-divisional town, Uluberia of Haora district, West Bengal, India and have been trying to figure out who the hell or heaven actually I am, but officially I am one of the members of the international collective ‘Little Box’ and the founder of Instagram and Flickr pool- ‘lyrical_sp’. My photographs reflect my psyche and thus may tell a whole lot about me.
WHAT?
I try to explore each and every corner of human life or street life when out for shooting. Being a keen observer, I like those little individual moments where my subjects’ psychological drama can be studied through the medium of street photography. Moody street visuals with a sense of noir feeling or ambiguity always draw me into such scenes that bridge up the bond between the earthly world and the world of dreams. I also have an affinity towards evocative and poetic images. I work both in colour and black and white in my photographs.
WHERE?
Wherever I go or visit, I tend to capture photos candidly. Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) is the place where I shoot most, but I also capture photos in different places in India during my travel days. I have been photographing my hometown Uluberia and its countryside since the lockdown in 2020.
WHEN?
I had an affinity towards photography from my college days (back in 2002), when I often borrowed my uncle’s Zenit film camera and took snapshots of my friends and others during tours. There was a pause of 5 years or so when I did not photograph much due to studies. After getting the job of teaching in 2006 I started travelling with my close friends and thus resumed photography again in 2008 using my Nokia mobile phone. I bought my first digital point and shoot Nikon camera in 2013 and Canon 1200D DSLR camera in July, 2015 respectively. I have been doing photography seriously since I came in contact with the street photography group of APF Magazine on Facebook, mentored by the sensational Vohra Brothers (Vineet Vohra & Rohit Vohra).
I generally go out for photowalk on Sundays and during holidays at my school. I don’t mind capturing photos anytime of the day as I take every kind of photo.
WHY?
There is a feel-good factor in photography that helped me get into this in its initial stage, but later I fell in love with it. In the real world, when I have so much to say but I could not, then there is no better way than those mediums of artistry. I took up photography to express myself more easily. It gave me the liberty to dive in a journey where I can manifest the reality into dream and vice-versa.
The reason I love street photography is because of its un-staged nature, spontaneity, reflex action or timing, intuitiveness to what might happen next, etc. To sum up all these, it provides challenges. There is fun when there is challenge. It reminds me the name of Charles Darwin’s famous theory on Adaptation, ‘Struggle for existence’.
