ĀTMAN: THE SOUL OF INDIA

Spirituality is manifested through intensely delicate, solitary rituals and through vibrant, collective expressions in India. It evokes passionate sentiment but also soothes and heals.

Erminia’s work captures this marvelous duality and suggests the deeper, intangible connection between people and their beliefs.  The photographs seek the detailed and the particular while also observing the overarching structures within which humans, nature and spirituality coexist [by Shweta Kishore, media critic and commentator].

Erminia’s exhibition is a proposition.  However, we are asked not to simply read the image as a document, but as a discourse between the practice of spiritual belief and the language of photography. This is beautifully captured in the image of a woman prostrating at an alter.  Her arms out stretched as though grasping for something that is real yet infinitely deferred.  By comparison, we stand in front of the image linked to the subject by a sense of wanting to know, to understand.  Yet the pleasure of the image is precisely the moment between the read and the unread, the known and the unknown.

Insofar as spirituality is a search rather than a destination, Erminia’s photography offers the spectator the opportunity to momentarily grasp that which is perhaps already lost.  These images should not be read as fact, but stills in an eternal narrative that celebrates life, love, death and the magic of the photographic image  [By Shawn Ashkanasy, Academic/writer].

View ATMAN photo-slides

The photo-exibition was accompanied also by the short-film “Haridwar: A spiritual journey” and academic publications on Spirituality, wellbeing and suicide (e.g. Recognizing spirituality, 2007, WCPRR)