"I'm not looking for the perfect moment. I'm looking for the honest one."
I grew up in Mumbai. I came to California in 2016 for business school. I run a team during the week and I make photographs on the weekends, and most of the time I am doing some version of the same thing. Which is showing up with people, paying attention, and trying to do right by them.
Two different worlds. I belong to both.
About
I came to San Francisco in 2016 for business school. I was probably too young at the time to really know what I wanted from my life. But I knew the kinds of things I liked. I knew I wanted to see the world. I knew that meeting people was going to teach me more about myself than anything else.
It was the kind of thing I had not let myself fully believe could happen. Walking around downtown San Francisco with my headphones on, I would catch myself thinking, I am actually here. I wanted to live it fully.
Mumbai is still in everything I do. My friends, my parents, the hustle I left behind. I miss most of it most of the time. None of that is a complaint. It is just true.
Coming to
San Francisco
When I was seventeen my father bought me my first camera. It came from a small shop a few minutes from our house in Mumbai, and I remember walking out with it not really knowing what I was supposed to do with it. I took it to the zoo first. I had a telephoto lens and I wanted to point it at something, and animals seemed like a good start.
A few months later I was at a hill station in India. The sun was going down. There was a monkey sitting on a wall and there were mountains behind him. I lifted the zoom, framed him, and the light just went into his eyes. I had never seen that before. I have not stopped thinking about that frame since.
After that day, the camera came with me everywhere.
The first camera
Early Years
I have been with the same company since 2018. We were fifteen people when I joined. We are over five hundred now. I run a division of about fifty five people, and most of what I do during the week is the part of the job I am genuinely good at and care about. Making customers happy. Talking with partners. Watching people on my team grow up inside the company. Watching them get married. Watching their families get bigger. Watching them take on things they were not sure they could.
That part of work feels a lot like photography does. It is people, mostly. It is the long arc of staying in relationship with someone for years. There are meetings I sit in that I do not love, the way anyone has parts of their job they do not love. But the rest of it is something I would happily do for a long time.
So photography is not an escape from work for me. It is a parallel version of the same thing, which is meeting people and trying to do right by them.
What I do during the week
"It is people, mostly."
I have photographed a lot of families and couples at this point. People from every kind of background. Military families. Social workers. Doctors. Engineers. People who landed in the country last year and people whose families have been here for generations. Different homes, different languages, different ideas about what a family even looks like.
What I have learned is that you cannot capture any of that by posing it. You have to wait for it. You have to give people enough room to forget you are there. The picture I am usually after is the one fifteen minutes after the session has started, when someone makes a joke and the kid runs into the frame from somewhere off camera. That is the picture.
I do not love photography that is too clean. I do not love the kind of frames where someone is angling their jawline. Your kid is not staged like that. Your dinner table is not staged like that. I want the photos on your wall to feel the way the day actually felt, not the way you would have edited it later.
The way I shoot
how I work
I have a family I have been photographing for seven years now. Ladi and David in Emerald Hills, with their two kids. Same month every year, different days, often the same garden. The session itself is the easy part. After we wrap, I usually end up sitting at their place for another thirty or forty minutes, and we just talk. About life. About work. About what has changed for them and what has changed for me.
The last time I went, one of their kids was away at college and was not at the session. Ladi took me down the hallway where she has every set of photos from every year framed on the wall. 2018, 2019, 2020, all the way to this one. We stood there and looked through all of it. She got quiet. Her eyes filled up.
I do not know how to describe what that hallway felt like. The kids were grown. The clothes had changed. The light in the garden was a little different every year. But the family was the same family, and you could see them becoming who they were going to be, one frame at a time. That is the whole reason I do this.
Seven years in Emerald Hills
When I first started taking photography seriously, Facebook had an option to make a business page for your work. My friend Anmol helped me set mine up. He helped me write the content, showed me how to post, sat there with me while I figured it out. This was before ChatGPT and Claude, before any tool could help you write what you were trying to say. He just gave me his time. The page started getting interactions, and a lot of appreciation, and that is the kind of thing that quietly tells you to keep going.
My dad. When I would go on three or four day trips for wildlife photography in the national parks, he would come along and hold my backpack. He would sit somewhere nearby and not say anything. He would just smile and watch me chase whatever I was chasing. He never expected anything from me for it. He just enjoyed being the person who got to see me follow my passion.
My mom, in Mumbai. There were mornings I had to leave for a shoot at six, which meant I was up at three thirty. She was up at three thirty too. Making me food. Packing things. Saying nothing about how early it was. There were late nights and small compromises, and she never made any of it sound like a sacrifice.
My roommates in San Francisco, when I first moved here. They would make me breakfast on the days I had a shoot. They would have dinner ready when I got back. It was their way of telling me they wanted this to work for me.
My friends from school and college. Krisha. Without the trust these people gave me, none of this would be here. I think about that often.
I have to say this somewhere on this page. None of what I do exists on its own.
I did not get here alone
My wife Krisha is a dentist. She sees somewhere between twelve and twenty patients a day, and when she comes home in the evening she always has a story about someone. By the end of the telling, it is almost always the same conclusion, which is, they were so happy I helped them today.
I know that feeling. It is the same thing I feel after a good session. You forget what you made that day. You remember the person. You remember the way they laughed at something their kid did. You think about that for weeks.
We do not work in the same field, but we recognise each other in this.
Krisha
my wife
I am not the photographer who does this to make a living. I am the photographer who does this because I genuinely want to meet you, and because I want to make a record of your people that you will still want to look at twenty years from now.
If that sounds like the kind of thing you are after, we will get along.
Aman
