Karolina Gembara arrived in Delhi in 2009 to study photography and remained for seven years. The pictures gathered in When we lie down, grasses grow from us come out of that long residency rather than a single reporting trip, and they carry its unsettled weather: fascination with the city, persistent homesickness, and the sense of living temporarily even as the years accumulated. Gembara moved often during those years and found it hard to make a home or a place of real comfort. Among people in similar circumstances, housing was provisional; even intimacy could feel makeshift. The book takes its title from that condition of impermanence, and its photographs are shaped by it.
The work is not a documentary survey of Delhi, nor a diary of arrival. Gembara’s attention falls on the texture of borrowed rooms, on the bodies and gestures of people who are also passing through, on the way a city becomes familiar without ever becoming one’s own. The sequence holds fascination and resentment in the same frame, which gives the book its particular tension. A photographer who stays seven years earns a different view than a visitor: closer, more implicated, less able to resolve the city into a tidy subject. That ambivalence is the book’s real subject.
GOST Books published the collection in 2019 as a 96-page cloth quarter-bound hardback with foil debossing. The design does not compete with the images; it lets the sequence do its work. The book will interest readers of photographic accounts of South Asian urban life, work made by a photographer who is herself an outsider living inside the situation, and the ways a long-term relationship with a place can be registered photographically. It asks the reader to consider what it means to stay somewhere without ever fully arriving.
