A photographer, educator and bookmaker, Chandan Gomes’s work draws from his personal life and examines themes of beauty, imitation and abandonment. Along with Vicky Roy, Jyotsana Tripathi and Vinit Gupta, he is a co-founder of the Rang Open Library, New Delhi – an outdoor library of books and other printed material on photography.

Gomes was born in Delhi and studied philosophy at the University of Delhi. His first book, The World of Dew, was published by PHOTOINK in 2015, and comprises a collection of images and their accompanying texts, along with drawings by a 10-year-old girl, Aini Hasina Bano. Other works include installations such as People You May Know (2018) – a bricolage composed of 36 archival prints and everyday objects chronicling interactions between strangers on social media –– as well as photo essays such as The Unknown Citizen (2013), a documentation of the protests and public outcry against the gang rape of a young woman in Delhi in 2012, and There are Things I call Home (2014), a retracing of the photographer’s life through the objects in his childhood home.

Gomes has been a recipient of the India Habitat Centre Fellowship for Photography (2011), the Oslo University Scholarship (2012), the Neel Dongre Award for Excellence in Photography (2013), the FotoVisura Spotlight Grant (2014) and the INK Fellowship (2016). He has exhibited at PHOTOINK, New Delhi; the Kochi-Muziris Biennale; Les Rencontres d'Arles, Arles, France; and the FotoFest Biennial, Houston, USA among others.

As of writing, Gomes lives and works in New Delhi, where he teaches photography at the Sri Aurobindo Centre for Arts & Communications.