Saturday December 04, 2021

The Anti–Road Trip of an Indian American Photographer

Miraj Patel is running from water. His latest photographic series, Back East (2021), made during a cross-country journey from California to Connecticut earlier this year, is a reclamation of space in his homeland. “It’s the anti-road trip,” Patel, an MFA student at Yale, tells me, describing his project as being grounded in “the reversal of the movement from the East to the Great West”—an advancement mythologized in the American imagination as being in the direction of hope and success. For the first generation Indian American, eastward travel became an expedition toward the Old World, an attempt to orient himself to an ancestral “Eastern” homeland while remaining in the natal “Western” one. [ Original Story ]