Soham Gupta‘s statement:
Angst is my reaction to the trials through which some people must pass in our society.
This work has its roots in my childhood riddled with severe asthma attacks and in my troubled growing-up years spent trying to come to terms with the world’s expectations. Deep within Angst runs my anger, my frustrations, my hatred for a world in which there is no place for the weak, where weaklings are left to rot.
Nourished by this anger, this hatred, this cynicism, this body of work has grown into a hopeless tale of a fictive nighttime hellhole, whose nooks and crannies are inhabited by decaying souls.
Ultimately, I want Angst to stand as testimony to the requiem of countless dreams, even as it is a record of my angst-ridden youth.
Maybe there’s not much one should say about Gupta’s project Angst, but I can’t help but comment that Gupta seems to venture into a weirdly original place: as he approaches the most “exhausted” genre in photography – the portrait – he also seems to touch a dimension of the unseen. As he mastered angst? Is that what lingers in our minds? Which images are we really seeing? Are thee portraits about the human condition?
N I H I L S E N T I M E N T A L G I A, 