Bharat Patel is partnering with Kashmira Patel to exhibit together this Artweeks. Bharat blends his skills as a travel and documentary photographer with his imagination to create provoking and surreal visions of the future Oxford city’s landscape.
They have exhibited individually and jointly previously during Artweeks and various other venues.
Bharat's surreal Oxford series and fascinating Tribal photography was on display at the Plum Gallery in Banbury in the month of March 2023. During September 2023 Bharat will be exhibiting a new series of images at the Barn Gallery at St. John's College.
I am Oxford based travel and social documentary photographer. Over the last twenty years I have experimented with many other genres of photography; always looking for new ways to explore photography using different techniques. For me photography has no limits and no rules. I like to explore many of its forms and print my images using different techniques.
I like the notion that a photograph is only complete when it is printed. A printed photo gives a sense of importance and permanence to the subject. My passion is printing photographs in black and white. I often print these using six dilutions of pure carbon inks to bring out all the details and the tonal range in the photo. These carbon ink prints are also extremely archival. But depending on the image I also use a challenging alternative printing technique called Gumoil. This is a technique to print a photograph using artists’ oil paint. It produces one-of-a-kind painterly prints which are extremely grainy and textured.
For Art Weeks I will be exhibiting a number of these black and white prints together with my images of Recurring Dreams of Oxford. These later are a series of blended images depicting the “illusionary” experiences of dreams. You will be able to see all this and more of my photography during Artweeks.