Image Caption
© Pradip Malde
Artist Talk with Pradip Malde on his moving book From Where Loss Comes
Guggenheim Fellow, photographer, and educator Pradip Malde brings his landmark monograph From Where Loss Comes to the Studies in Photography gallery for an evening that reaches beyond the work's difficult subject matter into larger questions of how photography can prompt us to investigate and think about what holds human communities together.
From Where Loss Comes grows from and responds to the practice of female genital cutting in Tanzania. Malde will underpin this talk not on FGM itself but on the philosophical ground beneath it — on loss, on belonging, on the terrible intimacy of sacrifice. "We have a huge genetic desire to protect ourselves through communities," he has written. "One way of building a psychological fence around those who are closest to us is by terrorizing them." It is this terrifying paradox — love expressed as damage — that the photographs hold, and that Malde will explore in conversation with the audience.
Malde will also speak personally about the Scottish photographic tradition as a formative presence in his practice — the ways in which Hill and Adamson, the Annans, and a broader Scottish sensibility of dignity and witness have shaped how he sees, how he prints, and how he conceives of the photograph as a site of encounter rather than mere record.
Finally, he will turn to the essayistic nature of the work itself: what it means to make photographs that prompt discourse, that accumulate meaning across images, that refuse resolution — and where this particular inquiry is now leading him in his current work. Printed in platinum-palladium, the photographs in From Where Loss Comes carry the weight of the process: slow, exacting, luminous. The talk promises to be equally so.
© Pradip Malde