Aesthetic Road

Saptarshi Chakraborty is a self-taught, multidisciplinary art practitioner with active focus on visual arts. Photography being one of primary mediums, Saptarshi actively practices drawing, painting, music, literature, sculpture, graphic design, and theatrics. However, it’s important to mention that he does not consider himself an active performer of all these disciplines.

For more than the last two decades, Saptarshi has focused on photography mainly. His photographic works explore different lifestyles and try to make a discourse on the existence of us in the context of socio-economic strata. On the other hand, objectively, the images explore the mysterious relations between elemental denotation and the proposed or possible connotations. His keen interest is to experiment and learn from the possible communications that generate from a body of work.

Apart from being an active photographer, his activities include the overall improvement of photography as an art form. From this perspective he founded Rishi On Ride in the year 2018 with a designed action plan to help photographers. Rishi On Ride is a community of photographers participating in photography learning, exhibition, publication and print sale. It’s a non-profit venture and all the facilities are available for free to all photography enthusiasts.

Saptarshi proposes Rishi On Ride as a movement rather than an organization. It’s a germinating bed for visual art thinkers and practitioners. It’s a voice that is contemporary and a unique amalgamation of emotion and analytics.

Academics & Professional Road

On the academic road, Saptarshi graduated with a major in English language and literature. Post graduation, he completed his masters but did not appear for the final exam as a protest to the current mainstream learning system.

He joined the budding IT industry as an data entry associate. Soon, he shifted his track to Human Resource as that department somewhat relates to his aesthetic journey. Rishi worked in human resources for a decade and thought it to be enough. In 2018, he left his job and started his life as a fulltime photography worker.

He worked with Canon India and Tamron India as official mentor for a decade and facilitated more than 100 workshops with photography organizations from different parts of Bengal.

Exhibition and Publication Road

Rishi does not believe in proscenium exhibitions and is typically not interested in indoor hall exhibitions. He is rather focused and vocal about the “Intimate Exhibition” format that he is experimenting thoroughly with the Nazrana project. However, he has been part of a few invited exhibitions.

• Delhi Photography Festival – 2013
• Masters’ by Canon India, Kolkata – 2023

Apart from so-called proscenium exhibitions, his works have been showcased in multiple areas of Bengal in different photography exhibitions hosted by small groups of photographers who do not have the elite stamp to be mentioned in such type of websites. You may explore the Nazrana project for exhibition related activities.

Photography Worker Road

Saptarshi started intensively working on photography from 2005 onwards. The first 10 years were spent understanding the medium to the core. Though the practice (Riyaz) started then did not stop ever, he got engaged to photography mentoring from 2015. Leaving his job within 3 years, he got into the role of full-time photography worker. Since then he has been working on different aspects of photography in the context of photography learning, financial infrastructure for independent photographers and viewer engagement.