Queer Family in Bangalore, by Akshay Mahajan

Understanding your own sexuality is a struggle. Telling your family you’re gay can be difficult, so finding a rag-tag bunch of people you can share your feelings with helps. The search is for broad, reassuring chests, shared cigarettes, gossip exchanged over too much coffee – because being queer is as much about this new family as it is about sexuality.

Lovers may comfort desires, but the queer family is also there for you, drinking with you at your local bar, discussing difficult decisions – be it the college you want to go to or the colour of skinny jean that will suit you best.

Akshay Mahajan’s images present an intimate view of Bangalore’s queer community. His observations of the interactions of lovers and friends embrace their complexity, their moments of drama, solicitude and calm.

Wideyed is pleased to announce that ‘Queer Family in Bangalore’ is being exhibited for the very first time as part of the Blindboys Wideyed show.

Akshay Mahajan has traveled to some of the most dangerous and unlikely corners of South Asia. His work has brought him face to face with members of the Mumbai land mafia; helped him gauge the entrepreneurial spirit in Dharavi, one of Asia’s largest slums; taken him onto the sets of Bollywood films, on the trail of the Microfinance dollar in Rajasthan, across North India and Nepal in an all out auto-rickshaw race; and to Asia’s largest garbage dump, where rubbish is turned to profit at the cost of Cambodia’s environment and the health of the people who work and live there.

Akshay has been published in Tehelka, La Repubblica, Le Monde, Wired Magazine, Silk Route, The Daily Telegraph, Hindustan Times, Haaretz Daily, Air Magazine, and The New Indian Express. In 2009, he attended the prestigious Eddie Adams workshop.

Based in Mumbai, India and travel are continual inspirations for his work.

For more about Akshay, follow this link.

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*In the run up to the opening of BLINDBOYS WIDEYED on 12th March, we are blogging about each of the Blindboys photographers and the work they have sent us for the exhibition.