Urbana Americana is a photo project born out of my journey to discover an unfamiliar place. In my early thirties, I moved to a small town in Illinois, in the American Midwest, for work. I was born and raised in rural Bengal, India, where my forefathers spent their entire lives. Needless to say, this transition introduced me to a world vastly different from the one I’d always known. The food, people, and culture here felt dauntingly new, at once a bit scary and quietly exciting.

2023 - ongoing Midwest, USA

People all around the world grow up exposed to American pop culture, movies, magazines, television, pop songs. I was no different. This gave me a misguided sense of security, as if I already knew the place. But the America I arrived in was far from that image. It was a place much quieter, slower, and more withdrawn.

The images in this collection reflect my attempt to bridge that gap, to connect with and understand the people and places around me. It’s an outsider’s perspective, not because I didn’t want to belong, but because I couldn’t, not entirely. I often felt that the warmth and openness of the culture I grew up with didn’t always find a place here. In many ways, politeness masked a kind of distance, one that made real connection hard to reach for an outsider. So I turned to an old friend: the landscape. I found corners and sights which, unexpectedly, felt familiar. And through it, I began to understand the place itself, slowly. When real connection with people felt out of reach, the land offered me something steady, something that didn’t hold me at a distance or ask me to justify my presence. It became a quiet companion. It didn’t replace the need for human connection, but it helped hold that space while I searched for it. In documenting the quiet beauty often hidden in the ordinary, I found a way to feel at home in a foreign land.