Photoworks is pleased to announce Debmalya Ray Choudhuri is doing a Digital Residency across July 2026. Keep an eye out to learn more about Debmalya’s projects and his practice spanning photography, performance, and text. Debmalya’s work centres trauma and resilience while addressing broader societal questions on gender, identity, migration, and memory.
Biography
Debmalya Ray Choudhuri (b. Kolkata) (he/they) is a non-binary, self-taught photographer from India, based between New York/Calcutta.
Ray’s work seeks to identify the ways people express grief, desire, and longing and, in the process, search for community and kinship. The author resorts to these interpersonal relationships as spaces of resistance and care, where people can hold on to one another and learn to live with vulnerability. They use these encounters with friends and strangers to reflect on what it means to be queer in today’s complex sociopolitical world. Centered on the notion of collaboration, their storytelling challenges assumptions about identity, representation, and image-making that are often hidden within the blind spots of post-colonial capitalism. The boundaries between subject and photographer remain fluid, opening space for dual perspectives and deeper connections between the self and the other.
Deb has shown work worldwide, including at Les Rencontres d’Arles, Kranj Photo Festival, Photo Museum Ireland, Rotterdam Photo Festival, the LGBT Center in New York, the Griffin Museum, Vermont Center of Photography, and the Old Stone House in Brooklyn, among others. Their work has been featured in publications worldwide, including the British Journal of Photography, Der Greif, Granta Magazine, and Elephant Magazine. More recently, Deb was the winner of the Personal Award by CENTER Santa Fe and a finalist for the prestigious Arnold Newman Photography Prize 2025 in the US.