I grew up as a minority in a town where the majority of people were white. There were a few minorities, but the amount of ethnic diversity was very minimal. For me, this was most deeply felt in access to authentic, diverse foods. My father’s love language is food, so the authentic Indian food he made for us with so much of his heart was a huge contrast from the American food I saw so many of my classmates eating. The only place our family could get the ingredients we needed was hours away. All the snacks my dad stockpiled for us were snacks he grew up eating - though I could only pronounce very few of them. Regardless of how difficult it was to get ingredients for my dad’s Indian food, we still adored the Indian-American cuisine that my dad could whip up out of the bare minimum Eastern spices required, Kraft mac and cheese, or really anything he could get his hands on. 

I have been exploring my cultural identity through a series made with 35mm black and white film, and an alternative process. I have been working in the dark room and printing on plates, I used a process of printing images with liquid emulsion. In this series, each photo gives momentary glimpses of restaurants, and ingredients that a mixed race family inhabits, with one side living in a mixed race family with one side from India where my father originally originated from, and the other side in America where my mother is from. The other inspiration for this series is to help me heal my inner child that grew up in a mixed race family because despite my appearance of being white in passing, I have still experienced racism,and microaggressions in my small, rural community. This also ties into why I choose to not have the plates perfect different exposures, and different patterns of how the emulsion is applied. This is to symbolize the idea of dirty plates, and dealing with comments I received from people telling me that somehow my race is dirty. My main photographic infusions are Duane Michals and David Emitt Adams, due to the use of the dark room especially with Michals’ work and the use of printing on objects from Adams. The main objective of my work is to help people growing up in less diverse communities to understand that they are not different and to help them heal by just enjoying the food they enjoy.