Sunhil Sippy on the fading art of analogue photography and building a living archive

EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke is a photography exhibition that comes together in retrospect. London-born, Mumbai-based photographer and filmmaker Sunhil Sippy has an unusual relationship with his photographic archive, which is largely uncategorised and sorted only by year. In it, away from the light of galleries and Instagram, his images ‘marinate’, unedited, sometimes for years until a crucial element of Sippy’s process—time—reshapes them into something intriguing and thematic. In an event titled With Compass and Camera: A Conversation on Archiving the City, Sippy speaks to Indian filmmaker and restorer Shivendra Singh Dungarpur and Mortimer Chatterjee, a partner at gallery Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai. The dialogue dwelled on Sippy’s process as an analogue and digital photographer, on building his archive and how his memories of visiting the industrial sites of his family’s steel business in Wadala and Kalwa as a child influenced the works being presented in the exhibition.

Although a distinct atmosphere pervades every image, the exhibition is incredibly eclectic in technique and format. During the talk, Sippy explains, “For me, what was really enjoyable was to bring the different languages together and not be frightened of it being, for lack of a better word, inconsistent. You were using squares, panoramas, digital [photography], film, using a little bit of colour for a particular reason.” This has some parallels with the almost uneasy coexistence between industry, infrastructure, people and plants depicted in the photographs. Darukhana (2013) sees workers moving in a line into an apocalyptic jumble of cranes, ships and construction materials, the monochromatic digital photograph and the smog choking the scene screaming dystopia. In Kalwa (2024), a steel pipe and its scaffolding cut through surrounding greenery, whereas Cotton Green (2024) shows an abandoned industrial building and a sparse tree, lit eerily by a flash that centres around a small piece of graffiti and then fades into dimness. Wadala Salt Pans (2019) foregrounds a black dog, an inkblot against the sprawling, brutal landscape of the salt pans, heat almost emanating from the image.

Photographs cluster on the walls of the gallery, each capturing a different side of the seaboard and highlighting different aspects of the photographic medium—here a film negative is double-exposed, there a digital panorama stretches to accommodate barren landscapes, shots of tree trunks and abandoned factory floors make use of unusual perspectives to defamiliarise and dramatise. All the images, however, are unmistakably Sippy’s. His interest in the setting was spurred by the dark sense of romance and awe he felt as a young child dwarfed by belching furnaces, towering cranes and the heat, dust and grime of industrial life in this rarely photographed part of Mumbai. However, the force behind Sippy’s images is repetition, rather than memory, as he explains. “The thing about my practice that is absolutely critical is retrospective understanding and repetition. At the time when I was making all of this work, there was absolutely zero intention to do anything with it. I started with a sort of reportage style and, as the years passed, I found that I wanted to see [the same spaces] differently. “

During the conversation, old friends Sippy and Dungarpur recount stories of creating films and photographs in a bygone Mumbai—discussing the fading art of analogue photography, Sippy’s rare embodied method of shooting without a viewfinder and the film lab in South Bombay they use for their work to this day. In response to a question by Chatterjee about creating in the ‘Instagram age’, Dungarpur recalls taking acclaimed German film director Wim Wenders through the streets of Kolkata, and the difficult task of finding something new to shoot, something that wasn’t already plastered across the walls of the digital world. Their discussions and tangents, guided by Chatterjee’s thoughtful questions, circle around the cities they grew up in, love and try to document. The numerous technical and stylistic minutiae they examine parallel their many-faced subjects.

Sippy lays out the challenges facing the contemporary photographer, asking, “How do we get to a point where a landscape is individualistic? How do we get to a point where a landscape cannot be photographed by somebody else? That is the journey that one goes on. The journey of repetition, of consistency, of constantly revisiting until a landscape speaks of you, of the way only you can see the landscape.” Sippy’s journey, although winding, uncharted and untimed, finally culminates in EASTWARD, an exhibition that is cohesive and undeniably individualistic.

‘EASTWARD: explorations along mumbai’s eastern seaboard’ is on view from May 15 – July 15, 2026, at Galerie Mirchandani + Steinruecke in Mumbai, India.