Aun Raza

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Aun Raza

PAKISTAN

Born in Lahore in 1983, Aun Raza graduated in multimedia arts from the National College of Arts in Lahore. He practised drawing and painting, before pursuing — and flourishing in — photography: “The immediacy of photography helped me grasp what the Russian theatre theorist Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) called “solitude in public”.”

 While his fields of exploration are multiple, Aun Raza favours portraits and photojournalism. Since 2010, the photographer has travelled in many countries, encountering different cultures and lifestyles. His work has been the subject of several exhibitions worldwide: Yangon Photo Festival 2018 and 2015, Myanmar; QR Photogallery White Night, Bologna (2016); Angkor Photo Festival 2016 and 2015; Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2014). His series Here Lies Lahore was displayed for the biennial contemporary photography exhibition Photoquai in 2015.

For the Love of Lahore

2018 Photographic Residencies

“I bring photography and voyeurism together: for me, it’s a way to read people’s diaries and share their lives – and, in particular, stolen moments. By taking photographs of situations of surrender and despair, as well as that joy whose radiance is sometimes palpable in the air, I feel like I’m capturing that moment when one holds their breath.”

Pakistan is able to provide those kinds of contradictory emotions: “exasperation and aspirations, music and tears, chaos and consolation, life and grief”. Aun Raza chose to continue his photographic project by capturing history’s last traces of a changing city. It is his home town — which he left over ten years ago — that Aun Raza decided to study closely with his camera, with distance and humour: “In Lahore, amid destruction and deterioration, there remains beauty, sweatiness and intensity in the faces, music and colours of these travellers camping by the Ravi River to whom the town owes part of its lost heritage”.

This series prolongs Here Lies Lahore, Aun Raza’s photographic diary of Lahore’s inhabitants that was displayed for the previous biennial photography exhibition Photoquai in 2015.

Series produced between 2018-2019.