Eyeliner Gali
For more than a decade, I have roamed the streets of the cities I have called home or visited, photographing at night. I built up a large and fairly loose body of work at first, without thinking of it as a project or series, until one day I chanced upon the words “Eyeliner Gali” graffitied onto a wall.
That found title helped me clarify what I wanted to do with my photographs. Gali in Hindi means street or lane, and Eyeliner Gali seemed to me to be a quasi-fictional lane branching out from the real world when night falls. I looked for Eyeliner Gali in the photographs I had already made, and I looked for Eyeliner Gali when I went out to make more photographs. Without defining it too narrowly, I looked for a certain mood – shadowy, melancholic, with a sense of stillness about to be punctured by some nameless menace.
The images presented here are a selection of that work, which I hope to publish in book form one day. I’m grateful to Yumi Goto and Mariela Sancari for helping me take the first steps towards that goal during their photobook workshop at JaipurPhoto 2017.
© Karthik Krishnaswamy, 2024