Bio
Partha Sengupta is an Indian activist and award-winning documentary photographer. Born in Calcutta to a refugee family, with an MBA, and a diploma in System Design Analysis, then spent nearly a decade working with India’s largest financial institutions, while simultaneously pursuing his interest in street and social documentary photography. In 2012, he embraced photography full-time, joining the staff of a local newspaper, where he worked for the next three years, and attending workshops by Sahidul Alam in Calcutta. In 2013, his images were selected for exhibition at South Asian Culture in Montreal, Canada. An image from this work was a finalist in the 2014 Nikon Photo Contest. He was commissioned by an NGO to work on a story on the human trafficking of women in the Bihar state of India. While attending the Counter Foto mentorship program in Bangladesh, he began exploring work about the Bengal Partition. This would result in The Bloodiest Border, which in 2016 was exhibited at Charukala in Dhaka, and was a finalist for Burn Magazine’s Emerging Photographer Award and Documentary Project Award. In 2018, he was awarded the Serendipity Arts Foundation Fellowship to develop Sons of Soil, a long-term project about Bengali refugees who migrated, like his family, to India in 1971. The project received additional support from Artisinal in 2021, and he was subsequently nominated for the World Press 6X6 Global Talent Program. Sons of the Soil was exhibited at Goa, Kozhikode during the Subaltern Festival, at New Delhi in the Indian Parliamentary Gallery, and the Artisinal Gallery in Delhi. In 2022, he was awarded a full scholarship to study Documentary Photography and Visual Journalism at the International Centre of Photography in New York. In 2023, his images of border violence were exhibited at the Angkor Photo Festival in Cambodia, finalist in the Chennai Photo Biennale on the story ‘A Tale of Two Women & Others’, and as one of the contributors to the book on ‘An Archieve of Violence’ edited by haram Khonsavi of Stockholm University, Sweden. He is currently based in Calcutta and has a special interest in Anthropology.
