I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you : Hari Katragadda & Shweta Upadhyay (Signed)

Signed First Edition | Limited Edition | Numbered | Handmade

• 106 Pages | Edition of 500 
• Handmade accordion fold | Hardbound with jute thread spine
• Glow-in-the dark painted box | Offset Printing
• English
• 24 x 16.5 x 6 cm 
• Published: 2022| First Edition | Numbered & Editioned
• Publisher : Self Published
• ISBN-13: ‎ 978-9356073104
• Rare Handmade book & Signed/Numbered by Author in Original

I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you is a collaborative project, inspired by the opening scene in Jean Luc- Godard’s Le Mépris (1963) and the Billie Holiday song, I’ll Be Seeing You (1944). This body of work was initiated by Katragadda on the expressions and registers of love through a protagonist, his partner Shweta. It is an ode to the in-betweens, the interlude filled with memories of loves lost and a longing for the reawakening of love. It attempts to capture ways of seeing and searching for one’s lover, the desire and heartache of looking for the elusive other in the spaces around. The overarching symbol of the moon combines the desire for the lover, the desire for the world, and the desire for the image. The book draws from the genre of gothic romance with subtexts of the supernatural, absent presences, portentous spaces charged with fear and desire, hidden secrets, omens, and birds. Like the moon that indexes both absence and presence, wholeness and emptiness – the book’s central character is a haunting figure on the verge of disappearance and subsequent reappearance. The book also interweaves the gaze of the photographer with the voice of the subject. Through mark making, erasure and embroidery, the aim is to layer the images to bring out the complexities of the self and relationships. The subject is not passive but answers back and takes charge of her narrative and steeps it with fiction, fable, suppressed memories, allusions, ghostly presences, secrets, and lies.

These spreads from their photobook highlight direct interventions on the surface of the images. For them, “the images become the background, almost the surface of a diary, on which feelings and thoughts are foregrounded and articulated.” Disrupting the materiality of the photographs, the book also uses paint and text on some of these photos to reflect erasure while stitching metaphors to repair the torn images.