P5 – Siddharth Khajuria
Giving Notice by Siddharth Khajuria
Assembled from parallel archives of an artist’s film photography and poetry, Giving Notice is “a reluctant love letter to the decisions that we make and the often-monotonous nature of life”.¹
Without knowing what it would grow into, Siddharth went through every poem and photograph he’d made over the course of a two year period before he decided to resign from a busy and consuming job. Returning to these printed fragments again and again – in his studio, in bed, on a family holiday, in at least one dream – patterns began to emerge.
Siddharth was initially surprised by what he found: an increasingly fragmented attention; whiplash born of transitions between suburban tangles and inner city crispness; being knocked off kilter by his kids’ questions; an obsessive relationship with the surface of the river he’d cross almost every day.
In Giving Notice, these threads come together as an ode to the friction that comes from paying a kind of ritual attention to the rhythms and structures of our lives.
¹from Hannah Geddes’ essay, Without Rivalry or Redundancy. Part of Photography+ In at least one dream! #30.
Siddharth Khajuria is an artist and producer based in suburban London. He often assembles work from archives of his own photography, writing and correspondence. Recent projects include a series of painted photographs, Your Careful Facades, and the book Why are we doing it like this?, a communal portrait built from the words of friends. He also co-produced A Map of the Moon, a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about human imaginations for the moon. He’s co-founder of the charity Grand Plan, and has worked in producing, programming and leadership roles at the Barbican, BBC, and Science Gallery London.
P5
P5 is a new photography and poetry pamphlet series directed by Photoworks in partnership with David Solo, and designed by Jane & Jeremy. Photography and poetry have been in dialogue since the earliest days of the camera. The space between these forms invites layered meaning, unexpected emotion, and new ways of seeing. Yet despite nearly 200 years of such work and many stand out examples, photo-poetry has not been widely recognised as a distinct genre.
Today there is a growing interest in this field, and to further encourage, support and draw attention to the possibilities of such combinations, we decided to launch a new pamphlet series called P5.
