Bhumika Bhatia

Gritty-glam, striking, and dreamy, Bhumika’s photographs have an ethereal quality to them that makes them hard to forget. No wonder her work is garnering plenty of attention.

For 22-year-old contemporary portrait photographer Bhumika Bhatia, the ability to capture her dreams in a photograph is what she finds most intriguing. As a kid, she wanted to become an astronaut, but things didn’t quite happen as per plan. “Never mind, I will go to NASA in the future and photograph the Earth from space,” she laughs. For the time being, she’s content with making several big splashes in the photography world. In February 2009, she had her first exhibition Sublunary World, and later that year, she participated in a fashion contest and stood eighth worldwide, with her photographs exhibited at Paris Fashion Week. Soon after, her work showed at Selfridges, London as a part of the fash-famous PEP (Jimmy Choo and the Elton John Foundation), and a month later, she was one of the winners of India’s first fashion photography competition and got a chance to work with ace snapper Jatin Kampani. And we haven’t even got to the bits about The Nonsense Society featuring her in their Top 10 Young Photographs list, or the fact that she was on the front page of the Vogue Italia (“Twice!”). “It’s been exciting,” she admits, “but it was tough.” “I try to capture youth, innocence, and dark desires through my photographs, and when I started out, I was criticised for being different,” she says. “But, that didn’t stop me. I stuck to what I believed in and here I am, determined to show my art to the world.”